When Philip S. Van Cise became Denver’s district attorney in 1921, the city reeked. Bootlegging, gambling, prostitution and narcotics flourished. Underworld czar Lou “The Fixer” Blonger collected cuts from Denver’s criminals and paid off the police and politicians.
Blonger courted the new DA with a “campaign contribution” of $25,000. Van Cise refused. Through a long campaign that side-stepped corrupt police and public officials, he finally locked up Blonger and his gang.
Van Cise tells the story in his 1936 autobiography, “Fighting the Underworld,” an eye-opener for anyone assuming Denver has always been the relatively honest, well-run city it is today.
Van Cise is one of the few heroes to emerge from one of the darkest chapters of Colorado history. His courageous pursuit of justice is now commemorated by the soon-to-be opened new Denver jail, known as the Van Cise-Simonet Detention Center.
Born in Deadwood, S.D., in 1884, Van Cise received bachelor and law degrees from the University of Colorado.
Van Cise took on not only the underworld but also the entrenched Colorado power structure, which came to be controlled in the mid-1920s by the Ku Klux Klan. The hooded empire had elected one of its members, Benjamin Franklin Stapleton, mayor of Denver and another member, Judge Clarence Morley, governor of Colorado. Mayor Stapleton declared in 1924: “I shall give the Klan the kind of administration it wants.”
While Stapleton later denounced the Klan and dropped his membership, Van Cise fought the masked marauders from their early 1920s emergence. He assigned five of his men to infiltrate the Klan and give him weekly reports. Van Cise publicly exposed KKK plans and discredited their charges that Catholics, Jews, blacks, non-northern European immigrants and others were un-American.
When the Klan threatened to punish janitor Ward Gash for “intimate relations” with a white woman, Gash asked Van Cise for help. The DA investigated, found Gash innocent and publicly exposed the hooded empire.
Denver’s mayor, Colorado’s governor and U.S. Sen. Rice Means kowtowed to Colorado KKK Imperial Wizard John Galen Locke. Van Cise took another approach. In 1925, he arrested Locke and charged him with kidnapping an East High School student and forcing him under threat of castration to marry a woman several months pregnant. This incident exposed Locke to public doubts and ridicule. The once all-powerful grand dragon resigned on June 30, 1925. That same year, Van Cise stepped down as district attorney and went into private practice. He died in Denver in 1969.
The other half of the jail’s name, Simonet, is for L. John Simonet, a reform-minded Denver manager of safety from 1985 to 2000.
A former Catholic priest, Simonet personally visited every prisoner and challenged the hard cases to one-on-one basketball. He insisted on direct supervision of inmates by an officer and launched volunteer community service and educational programs. He transformed a cruel, inefficient jail into one of the first in the nation to be accredited by the American Correctional Association and the National Commission on Correctional Health Care.
In that humane tradition, Denver’s state-of-the art new jail has no bars but fresh air, natural light and many recreation areas with basketball hoops. “This handsome and humane building,” Simonet declared at the April 14 dedication, “will not only protect our citizens but also provide an environment of dignity, respect and humanity for the staff, visitors and inmates alike.”
The $159 million, five-story limestone edifice has 1,500 beds, two courtrooms and its own infirmary. The instant landmark, located at 490 W. Colfax Ave., is a notable addition to Denver’s Civic Center and evidence of Denver’s compassion for even the least fortunate and most despised.
Tom Noel welcomes your comments at drcolorado.auraria. edu.
