In an earlier chapter I promised that we would look more closely into the methods Charles Deville Wells might have used to achieve such spectacular gains at Monte Carlo.
First, though, we should step back and view his accomplishment in perspective. He was by no means the only individual to break the bank – or even the first. As we have already seen, Prince Lucien Bonaparte and Tomás Garcia had enjoyed huge successes at François Blanc’s first casino in Bad Homburg. Others did the same at Monte Carlo. In March 1891 – only weeks before Wells became famous there – an unnamed visitor won £7,000 (£700,000). An ‘English nobleman’ won £10,000 (£1 million) not long afterwards. By the 1910s, the feat had become an almost daily occurrence.
Why, then, did Wells earn a place in history, when so many others – both before and after – were so quickly forgotten? The reason is not so much that he scooped up a fortune, but that he was able to repeat the trick – apparently at will – a total of ten or more times. (And that famous song, of course, enshrined his deeds for posterity.)
When analysing his success we should never rule out luck as a factor, even though the likelihood of anyone repeating his feat is extremely remote. Every day, somewhere in the world, seemingly impossible coincidences do occur. All the evidence shows that Charles Wells went to Monte Carlo with a purpose, however, and everything we know about him suggests that he would not have trusted to luck alone.
Disregarding plain good fortune, then, it seems that we are left with four possible scenarios. All of the following have been put forward – or at least hinted at – over the years:
1 He used his engineering expertise to help him win;
2 He had developed an infallible system of play;
3 He found a way to defraud the casino;
4 He colluded with the casino.
Let us look at each of these possibilities in turn.
Could Wells really have applied his experience in engineering to the problem of beating the bank at Monte Carlo? There is some justification for believing that he could.
Legend has it that a man named Jaggers, an engineer or mechanic from a Yorkshire textile mill, went to Monte Carlo in the 1870s. He theorised that roulette wheels might have mechanical flaws, and that these could result in certain numbers coming up more often than others. He recruited a team of helpers, who wrote down the numbers at every table over a period of a month. Analysing the results he discovered that his theory was correct: one wheel, in particular, produced certain numbers more frequently than chance would dictate. He backed the ‘good’ numbers, and is said to have won £120,000 (£12 million).
The story has been told and retold many times: however, I doubt whether it is strictly true. Research suggests that the incident was not reported at the time it was supposed to have happened, and the earliest mention of it that I can find is in a 1901 book, Monte Carlo Anecdotes and Systems of Play, by the Hon. Victor Bethell.1 It is probable, therefore, that Bethell concocted the story himself. ‘Jaggers’ and Wells share some characteristics. Both broke the bank, both were Englishmen and both worked in engineering. Perhaps Bethell based the seemingly fictional ‘Jaggers’ on Charles Wells.
Although ‘Jaggers’ may be an imaginary character, it has come to be accepted that a roulette wheel could develop a fault and show a bias towards certain numbers. By about 1910 (and probably considerably earlier) the casino at Monte Carlo had introduced daily checks to ensure that all of the wheels were true.2 Thus it was possible that Wells – who was once said to have employed two secretaries to record the numbers – could have formulated a way to forecast the winning numbers.
In practice, however, it is hard to see how Wells could have won so consistently over several days without casino staff realising that the wheel was behaving in an unusual way.
This is how Wells himself claimed to have beaten the bank. In his testimony before the Paris court he said, ‘A professor once told me, “a martingale doesn’t work”. So I thought, there’s only one thing to do to improve it. Make it work!’
On the other hand, when a Times reporter had observed him at Monte Carlo twenty years earlier, there was no apparent sign that Wells was using any discernible system. But when he tried to recruit sponsors to back him to the tune of £6,000, it was vital to make it appear that he had perfected a winning strategy. The scheme would only work if he could convince them that he had developed a proven, winning formula, as opposed to just taking their money and hoping for the best. And it may have suited him later to claim that he possessed an infallible system since this acted as a smokescreen, concealing his actual methods.
Having said this, it is probable that he optimised his chances of winning by playing for long periods of time, by having a large amount of capital at his fingertips and by keeping his head even when the stakes were high. The money he gambled with ultimately belonged to other people, and he therefore played more aggressively than the average gambler who risks his own capital. This factor alone could have tipped the balance in his favour. Wells gained a further advantage by sending each day’s winnings home to England so as not to risk losing them, and, as the reporter for The Times mentions, ‘Mr. Wells has the rare faculty of knowing when to stop …’
Considering Wells’ history as a fraudster, it would be a serious omission if we failed to consider the possibility that he swindled the casino.
However, this would have been an immensely difficult feat to pull off, even for a man of Wells’ ability. The casino had been in existence for a long time, its owners were wise to all of the tricks and they could have ejected him from the premises if they were in the least suspicious. He undoubtedly would have needed inside help from a number of the employees. All of these matters would have been hard to arrange, and there was a constant risk that the plot would be discovered before it produced any returns.
Admittedly, schemes of this kind have been attempted over the years and have sometimes succeeded … up to a point. In the early 1980s, fifty casino staff and gamblers were arrested in San Remo, Italy. It was alleged that ‘croupiers and some supervisory staff saw to it that selected regular customers made large winnings and then shared the proceeds’, with a loss to the casino of between £4 million and £8 million.
But Wells was a loner, and for him to recruit and orchestrate a sizeable team of accomplices from among the casino staff seems quite out of character.
Beginning with the very first reports that Wells had broken the bank, some commentators insinuated that his wins were nothing but a huge publicity stunt. In August 1891, when Wells had barely left Monaco, a columnist stated:
The same newspapers have fallen with eyes and mouth open into a trap set for them by the administration at Monte Carlo. Business being dull, it became necessary to start another boom, and a story was invented about an Englishman who has this week won £20,000 at roulette … The newspapers here have published the story in full, with the usual wealth of headlines, and the expected rush for Monte Carlo has already commenced …
In my own estimation, these early reactions probably contain at least a grain of truth. While the exact sequence of events will never be known, I believe that the story probably unfolded along the following lines.
By early 1891, the casino badly needed a hefty dose of good publicity. Prince Albert had been ruler of Monaco for fifteen months, and it was no secret that he was opposed to the casino on moral grounds, and wanted to close it down. As if to atone for the sins of the past, he and his wife were already considering alternative uses for the building – such as a free hospital for tuberculosis sufferers. Preparing for the worst, Camille Blanc had already started to search for an alternative home for his casino. It is a matter of record that he approached the Prince of Liechtenstein, offering a down payment of 10 million francs (£40 million) and agreeing to cover the entire cost of the principality’s public services and defence budget, in return for being allowed to establish a new casino there.
While Blanc anxiously waited for the prince’s reply, all he could do in Monte Carlo was save money wherever he could, and wring every last drop of profit out of the business before it was forced to close. These economies had already blighted the new gaming hall, the Salle Touzet. Although the room had been intended to match or even surpass the existing ones in its splendour, it had opened in January 1890 with little, if any, of the lavish ornamentation originally specified by the architect. After all, there would have been little point in carrying out such elaborate works while the future of the casino itself hung in the balance.
At the same time Charles Wells was desperately short of money. Somehow, I believe, he and Camille Blanc got together to formulate a plan which would be to their mutual advantage. Wells had previously lived in Nice – just 14 miles from Monte Carlo – and he could well have had long-standing connections with the Blanc family. It is also a fact that he had worked for Count Branicki, an inveterate gambler, who had been one of the casino’s best customers thanks to his propensity ‘to lose money at the rate of hundreds of thousands of francs a year’. But Branicki was more than just a client: he and Camille Blanc were distantly related.3 And although Branicki was no longer alive in 1891, Wells could easily have dropped his name into the conversation – or, indeed, Branicki might have introduced him to the Blanc family several years previously.
From Blanc’s point of view, Wells would have seemed the ideal frontman for the plot. He presented himself as an educated, professional man, was persuasive and credible, and had an easy manner which inspired confidence. The fact that Wells was actually an Englishman was an added bonus: it meant that reports of his successes were certain to be reported around the English-speaking world. Yet at the same time Blanc could converse with Wells as if he was another Frenchman. We know for a fact that Wells was in Monte Carlo in early 1891, because Inspector Richards found casino admission tickets for January of that year when he searched Wells’ offices in Great Portland Street. During that month Wells and Blanc could have met to work out a strategy.
When Charles Wells entered the casino at opening time that day in late July 1891, he was almost certainly the first client to set foot in the premises, and by visiting at such an unfashionable time he very likely had the place to himself for most of the time he was there. With no one watching – at least to begin with – it would have been easy to make it look as if Wells had started the day by winning some appreciable sums of money. By the time a group of spectators had formed around his table, he already had a pile of gold coins and banknotes before him (whether he had actually won this money, or whether it had simply been placed there for effect is immaterial). As with the San Remo incident mentioned above, it is possible for croupiers and customers to conspire without arousing the suspicions of the average observer. The initial impression would have been that of a gambler on a winning streak, and when many more people joined in later, the noise and confusion would simply enhance the illusion.
Of course, Wells had to have at least some genuine wins to be convincing. Whether his alleged ‘system’ made any difference or not is impossible to say, but with his available capital of £4,000 (£400,000), a cool head and the will to keep playing hour after hour, he only needed a small additional nudge to enable him to beat the bank. To ensure this, the casino could have arranged for him to sit at a table where the wheel was known to be biased towards certain numbers. Usually, faulty wheels were removed. On this occasion one of these could have been temporarily put back in place. At trente et quarante it was even easier to ‘fix’ the game, since with a little sleight of hand the management could arrange for the cards to come out in any desired order.
And once a certain point had been reached, the feat of breaking the bank was almost inevitable. It may be recalled that a casino employee, Bertollini, described how gamblers ‘crowded round his [Wells’] table, eight ranks deep, and all wanted to play the same numbers he did’. For example, let us imagine that Wells decides, at a particular moment, to stake 10,000fr. on black. Ten other people, intent on copying his every move, as Bertollini describes, make the same bet and stake the same amount. Black comes up: Wells and ten others receive 20,000fr. each (twice their stake). This pay-out alone would have been more than enough to swallow up the ‘bank’ – or cash reserve – of that table at a stroke. The bank has been broken, although Wells himself has only won the comparatively modest sum of 10,000fr.
But would Camille Blanc really have stooped so low as to take part in such a flagrant deception? I believe that he would – and that he did. This was, after all, a business which his father had set up using money gained by fraud and a business which, in 1891, still spent the equivalent of at least £1 million a year in bribes to newspaper editors. Against this backdrop a subterfuge of the kind outlined here does not seem at all out of place.
And we do not have to rely on supposition alone. Evidence that Blanc used tricks of this nature comes from an unimpeachable source. Sir Hiram Maxim, the famous inventor, was a regular visitor to the casino, and recalled an incident he once witnessed. One evening, Lord Rosslyn and a man named Sam Lewis – both well-known gamblers – had enjoyed a run of unusually good luck. After they had won several consecutive coups a croupier announced that they had broken the bank. A bell was rung and a black cloth solemnly draped over the table. More money was brought out in an ostentatious fashion and then play resumed. Maxim wrote:
My suspicions were excited; I did not believe for a moment that the Bank had actually been broken … I therefore remained to see the money taken from the table, when I found it was exactly as I had expected; there was at least a peck of large bank notes. It had not been necessary to send for money at all, this had only been done for effect. It was telegraphed all over the world that Lord Rosslyn and Mr Sam Lewis had broken the bank three consecutive times in a single evening. True, the Bank had lost money, but they turned it into a valuable advertisement.
Maxim’s evidence becomes all the more apt when we learn that the events he writes about took place in the same timeframe as Wells’ bank-breaking activities during 1891–92. The benefits to the casino were, as Maxim remarked, ‘a valuable advertisement’. Press reports of substantial wins encouraged hordes of other people to make the trip to Monte Carlo in the hope that they, too, would break the bank.
But in the beginning there was a small difficulty that Wells and Blanc had to surmount. The casino could hardly ask British reporters to come to Monte Carlo, as if they knew in advance that something out of the ordinary would take place. While most journalists would have been cock-a-hoop to receive an invitation to sunny Monaco, they would have guessed from the start that what they were witnessing was a publicity stunt.
So, on Wells’ first visit, Blanc waited until after Wells had broken the bank before giving the nod to Reuters’ local agent. By the time the story reached the newspapers in Britain, Wells had already departed. But the seeds had been sown; when he reappeared in early November, the merest hint that he was back in town brought journalists running to Monte Carlo. This time they had the opportunity to observe him at play and even to interview him.
In the meantime, though, Camille Blanc had patched up his differences with Prince Albert, and the casino was given a new lease of life. For several months previously, Blanc had resigned himself to making the most of a business whose days were numbered. But the new arrangement changed everything, and his new goals were: to complete the improvements he had previously postponed; to fill the establishment with as many paying clients as possible; to recoup the losses sustained in the interim; and to make up for lost time generally. By late October, work on the new gaming room had resumed and was proceeding at a frantic pace so that it could reopen in time for the peak season.4
Although the casino would not have to shut down after all, the plan hatched by Blanc and Wells had produced spectacular results for both men, and there was no reason why this happy state of affairs should not continue. When Wells broke the bank again in early November, the public poured into Monte Carlo in their thousands. And the new Salle Touzet – ‘very elaborately decorated’, according to The Times – opened in a blaze of publicity exactly one week later. The timing could hardly have been coincidental.
The collaboration between Charles Wells and Camille Blanc may well have been set to continue. But an unforeseen problem cropped up. Up to now Wells had managed to conceal the fact that ‘the Biggest Swindler Living’ and ‘Monte Carlo Wells’ were one and the same person. But it was impossible to keep a secret like this forever. The casino reportedly had ‘agents in all the capitals of Europe watching over their interests, and not a leader or paragraph concerning them in any newspaper of note is not cut out and duly dispatched to their offices at Monte Carlo’. Ugly rumours about Wells were rife, following the reports in Truth, and this was not at all the kind of publicity that Blanc had in mind.5 On hearing these whispers he doubtless severed all ties with Wells immediately. In any event, he had nothing to lose because the casino was busier now than it had ever been, and there was little point in continuing the charade any longer because Wells had served his purpose. The gaming rooms were already filled to bursting point with gamblers anxious to thrust their money into Blanc’s hands.
When Wells turned up again in January – almost certainly uninvited – Camille Blanc himself decided to be chef de partie at his table, as mentioned. Possibly this gesture was to let Wells know that Blanc was keeping an eye on him – or was it more of an attempt to browbeat Wells and put him off his game? Maybe Blanc just wanted to let him know that he was no longer welcome.
The evidence of collusion between Wells and the casino is purely circumstantial, of course. It is most unlikely that any written agreement between Blanc and Wells would have been drawn up. But Wells himself let slip several little clues which support this version of events. At his Old Bailey trial, Miss Phillimore spoke of the letter she had received from him, in which he said he ‘couldn’t have got through if the Monte Carlo affair hadn’t turned up’. In the ordinary way, his phrasing would seem odd. If a man decides to go to Monte Carlo to gamble, and fortuitously breaks the bank in the process, this is not an ‘affair’ which just ‘turns up’ – it is a deliberate act. But if a man who is undergoing a financial crisis is approached by another party promising a share in a fortune, and they collaborate on a scheme to realise that fortune, that could be described as an ‘affair’ that has ‘turned up’.
At another court hearing, Wells himself stated that he won £60,000 at Monte Carlo, and that he handed two-thirds of this sum to the mystery sponsor – whose name he refused to reveal – keeping one-third himself. If my belief is correct, Camille Blanc was, so to speak, the ‘backer’. Wells won £60,000. Under the agreement he then handed £40,000 of this sum back to Blanc, retaining £20,000 as his own share of the proceeds. The arrangement would explain his extreme reluctance to divulge the identity of his ‘backer’, even when under oath in a court of law. Another clue from the lips of Wells is the revelation that the mystery financier was watching him all the time. In itself, of course, this could refer to anybody, but as we have already seen, Camille Blanc was in the habit of surreptitiously watching over the tables – an intriguing piece of information that originates from the casino itself. ‘The bull’s-eye windows all around the room served as observation points over the gaming area. Camille Blanc used to hide there for hours to watch the players and his staff.’
It is also on record that Wells bought £2,000 of casino shares (£200,000). Did he figure out for himself that after he had broken the bank their value would increase? Was he given a friendly investment tip by Camille Blanc at the start of their business relationship? Or did Blanc hand him the securities as a kind of profit-sharing arrangement? One thing is certain – the value of the casino’s shares soared during and just after the period when Wells was active there:
Share price (francs) |
|
1890 (October) |
1,700 |
1891 (October) |
2,000 |
1892 (January) |
2,250 |
Thanks to this increase, the Blanc family’s 87 per cent stake in the casino rose in value by almost 30 million francs (about £120 million in present-day values) in less than two years. If, as seems likely, their association with Wells was along the lines suggested here, it was a most profitable business relationship, to say the least.
After his dealings with the casino in 1891–92, and his fraud conviction in England the following year, Wells seems to have become persona non grata in Monaco. Charles Coborn, who popularised the music hall song, recounts an incident which occurred while he was there in 1919 to make a film.6 He offered to give a free performance in the Café de Paris, which was part of the casino complex:
The manager was very polite and accepted with pleasure, especially when I told him I did not require payment. He said he would submit my repertoire to the directors. When I came the next evening to sing I was told that the directors were very willing, but there was one song which they particularly requested that I should not sing: they banned ‘The Man who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’.
It seems as if the casino wanted to wash its hands of Charles Wells and everything associated with him. To the present day it seems as if this stance has not shifted: the casino’s website mentions him only in passing, saying, ‘The mystery of his amazing success was never elucidated.’ I asked the casino what further details they had on him, if any. The substance of the company’s reply was that it held no information about Wells, beyond what was already in the public domain.
There again, perhaps Wells really did have a run of exceptionally good luck. The laws of probability dictate that – given time – a gambler will one day break the bank repeatedly, just as he did. Yet, knowing Wells as we do, it does seem most improbable that he would have relied on luck alone.
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1 Bethell was none other than the manager of Smith’s Bank in Monte Carlo at the time of Wells’ exploits there, or just after.
2 In much more recent times the anomaly has been exploited by gamblers using computers to predict which numbers to bet on. A new design of roulette wheel was introduced in the early 1980s to make it more difficult for gamblers to exploit these quirks. Soon afterwards a team of professional gamblers in Atlantic City, New Jersey, won $3.8 million using predictive technology at a casino where old-style wheels were still in use. ‘Every casino in the world took notice, and within one year had switched to the new low-profile wheel.’ (Wikipedia, ‘Roulette’ article.)
3 As mentioned previously, Camille’s sister had married Prince Radziwill, who in turn was related by marriage to Branicki.
4 The main feature of these decorations was a pair of enormous murals by the artist Lèon Auguste Cèsar Hodebert, each measuring 9.5 x 3.5 metres (about 31ft x 11ft) The pictures in question are Young Girls Playing With Swans and Young Girls Playing Music. Hodebert had also painted four smaller canvases for the Salle Touzet. All of these works were still in situ at the time of writing.
5 In one such article, Labouchère says that he has positive proof that the advertisement offering ‘one thousand pounds a day’ has been placed by ‘Charles Wells, C.E.’. His comments appear in the issue dated 5 November. Three days later, Wells is quoted in The Times as saying that he deplored the way in which casino detectives were following him around and trying to ascertain his identity.
6 The proposed motion picture was to have been called The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, with Coborn in the leading role; however, it was never completed. A 1935 film with the same title, starring Ronald Colman and Joan Bennett, was based in only the loosest possible way on Charles Wells’ exploits.