THE
BROKEN DOWN GAMBLER
Source: AMERICAN ECCENTRICS copyright
1984 by Carl Sifakis
Facts on File Publications, New York, N.Y. * Bicester, England
THE
KING OF THE PLUNGERS: John W. (
Bet-A-Million ) Gates (1855-1911)
Waiting for a business meeting to start, two men in
a New York office watched raindrops slithering down a windowpane, as if their
lives depended on it. Then one raindrop plunged downward suddenly, and one of
the men roared: “My win! That makes $50,000 you owe me. Let’s go again, double
or nothing.”
However, the other man had had enough. He was not
the compulsive gambler that the winner, Bet-A-Million Gates, was. In fact, he didn’t
know how he’d been talked into playing in the first place. His opponent,
barrel-chested, heavy-jowled John Warne Gates was the King of the Plungers. He
got his nickname of Bet-A- Million when, one day at Saratoga Race Track, he
tried to place a million dollars on a horse, causing the bookmakers to run for
cover.
Gates would bet on anything—cards, dice, roulette,
or he’d make up games like betting on raindrops if nothing else was available.
He had used the same tactic in business, speculating, trying to anticipate what
the other great movers of the day —financiers like the Morgans and the
Carnegies—wanted. Then he’d head them off and force them to pay till it hurt to
get it. Almost anyone with money hated Gates. “The man cannot be entrusted with
property,” J. P Morgan railed about the Illinois barbed-wire salesman who had
pyramided a $30-a-month salary selling wire to Texas cattlemen into a
$50-million fortune. “He’s
a broken-down gambler,” Andrew Carnegie raged. Once, after Gates took
Morgan in a $15 million deal, the latter in vengeance retaliated by seeing to
it that Gates was barred from admission to the Union League and the New York
Yacht Club.
Always crude and boisterous, (Gates was only
tolerated at the Waldorf Hotel because he was its highest-paving guest, keeping
a $20,000—a—year suite there just for use as a clubhouse. Because he was such a
liberal tipper, management discovered they could pay lower salaries to staffers
who were eager for a chance to hit it big with Gates. Gates had started gambling
while still a schoolboy. playing poker with railroad hands in idle train cars
at his native ‘Turner’s Junction, some 30 miles from Chicago. Gates knew how to
stack the odds in his favor and, although in later years he might drop as much
as a million dollars in a poker session that lasted several days and nights, he
always won far more than he lost. Generally that was because he could always
afford to come back, having enough money to double his bet after a loss. Once,
in Kansas City, a local sport begged an audience, saying he represented a local
syndicate that wanted to gamble with him on any sort of game. “You know I don’t
play for small sums,” Gates said. “How much have you got to spend? The sport
produced a roll of $40,000. Gates flipped a gold piece in the air. “Heads or
tails,” he said. “You call it.” The local gambler lost, and Gates pocketed his
winnings. The loser became a sort of local celebrity who was pointed out as the
man who had lost $40,000 to Bet-A-Million Gates in less than 10 seconds.
Once Gates was dining with wealthy~ playboy John
Drake, whose father had founded Drake University and was a governor of Iowa.
With their coffee, Gates suggested they each dunk a piece of bread and bet
$1,000 a fly on whose bread attracted the most flies. Gates collected a small
fortune. Slyly, he had turned the odds in his favor by first slipping six cubes
of sugar into his coffee cup.
From the moment Gates awoke in the morning, he was
looking for action. On a train en route to the races at Saratoga once, Gates
needed a fourth for bridge and told a newspaperman he knew casually: “We play
for five a point, but I’ll guarantee your losses and you can keep what you
win.” When the game ended, the reporter tallied up his points and gleefully
told Gates he was due $500 at Five cents a point. Gates leaned back and howled
with laughter until tears came. He wrote out a check for $50,000. They had been
playing for $5 a point, not Five cents.
These and many, many, many other bizarre incidents
made Bet-A-Million Gates a popular hero. That as much as anything got to
Morgan, who was himself labeled a “robber baron.” He regarded himself far less
an unprincipled speculator than Bet-A-Million. Finally though, Gates had his
run of bad luck. He found himself without cash and down to his business
investments, and they were held as collateral, payable on demand to his nemesis
Morgan. It is said that Gates literally dropped to his knees, begging Morgan
not to destroy him completely. Morgan relented to the extent of letting Gates keep
a portion of his former holdings, provided that he got out of Wall
Street and out of New York—and stay out forever
Gates moved to Port Arthur, Texas, where he was only
a shadow of his former affluence and influence. He searched around for a new gamble.
In 1901 Spindletop, the greatest gusher in petroleum history, had been brought
in. Gates formed his own oil company with several backers and hired an army of
geologists and drillers. They brought in a long string of dry holes, but
then they started to hit winners. In 1902, Standard Oil offered to buy Gates
company, called The Texas Company, for $25 million. Gates just laughed.
By 1911 Gates was personally worth somewhere between
$50 million and $100 million. He sent his firm’s latest financial statement to
Morgan. Later that year Gates died in a Paris hospital while on vacation with
his wife. He had already broken his promise to Morgan, having been living in
New York in the new and sumptuous Plaza Hotel since it opened in 1908. On his
instructions, Gates was buried in a kingly mausoleum not far from Wall Street.
Probably to his way of thinking, Bet-A-Million had taken another pot from old
J.P.