To be forever

In 1967, Griffin started a company called Griffin Investigations, Inc., “for the purpose of providing surveillance and investigative services to casinos,” according to their promotional brochure. Prior to the Griffin Agency, casinos had always provided their own surveillance, and they had rarely shared information with each other. But now, casinos had a common enemy-card counters-and Griffin’s main product was a mug book of names and photos of counters who had been identified and barred.

Most card counters learned about Griffin the hard way, when they found themselves being ejected from casinos where they had never played before, shortly after arriving at the blackjack tables for an initial play. Elaborate disguises and fake IDs soon became a necessity for high-stakes pros once they were “in the book.” Some players who were not card counters also found themselves being identified as counters in the Griffin book, as they had been misidentified to Griffin as such by paranoid pit bosses. Other non-pros had their names and photos entered into the Griffin book as “associates” of card counters simply because they had been seen socializing in the casinos with other players who were already in the book.

In the mid-eighteen hundreds, San Francisco’s Barbary Coast district had more than one thousand gambling houses, most being saloons, brothels, or some combination of saloon, brothel, hotel, and casino. We know that twenty-one was being played in the wild western states during the eighteen hundreds, and we can assume that it had come from the more civilized East, where casino gambling was technically illegal in most states, but still widespread. Some of the professional gamblers who came west with the ‘4gers were likely Mississippi riverboat gamblers looking for fresh suckers.
The first steam-powered paddleboats had appeared on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers in 1811, and by 1833 there were more than five hundred boats in service. According to Alan Wykes (The Complete Illustrated Guide to Gambling, Doubleday, 1964), by the l830s, approximately fifteen hundred professional gamblers were working the steamboats that ran between New Orleans and Louisville. That’s an average of three cardsharps on every boat. Says Wykes: “At first the cardsharp was an outcast … but as the boats’ officers became aware of the large potential income that lay at the tips of the cardsharps’ fingers … they became his accomplices.” The riverboat captains were soon competing with each other to attract not only the slickest cardsharps to their boats, but the wealthy travelers who were known to like a leisurely game of twenty-one or faro to pass the time on their journey. But with all the boats, and a growing army of cardsharps, the competition for suckers was getting worse every year. So, when gold was discovered in California in 1849, many of the gamblers went west to mine the pockets of the miners.
Eleanore Dumont is the first known professional twenty-one player in history. She was widely respected by the miners and gamblers who played against her because she was believed to deal an honest game. For all we know, she may have dealt completely on the square, and simply beat her customers as a result of the “house edge.” But most traveling card gamblers of that time did use sleight of hand, which was much more of an arcane art than it is today. Surely, there were other blackjack specialists before her, but none whose names are known and who specialized in the game of twenty-one exclusively. Throughout a gambling career of almost thirty years, Madame Mustache played only one game-twenty-one-and in the gambling dens of the old West, she became a legend in her lifetime.