Bane of the Bunco Men

Anyone who has ever been ripped off can admire a diminutive and otherwise unassuming Texan named J. Frank Norfleet, who was born during the last year of the Civil War and died four years after the JFK assassination. In between he was a buffalo hunter, ranch hand, foreman, ranch owner and a victim of con men who became a con man to catch them. 

Norfleet was born in Lampasas County in 1865 and joined one of the last buffalo hunts on the Llano Estacado when he was 14. He once drove 5,000 cattle from Central Texas to Muleshoe and became foreman of the fabled Spade Ranch. He married Mattie Eliza (Lizzy)  Higgins in 1894 and stayed with the Spade Ranch until he saved enough money to buy a 2,000-acre ranch of his own in Hale County. 

We wouldn’t know much about Norfleet today if Joe Furey, one of the most creative bunco men to ever spot an unwitting dupe, hadn’t conned Norfleet out of his life savings— and then some— in 1919. Norfleet was 54 years old and reasonably prosperous when he traveled to Dallas in hopes of selling one of his properties in order to buy a bigger one. 

The sting kicked off when Norfleet just happened to run into a man named Reno Hamilton. Hamilton passed himself off as a mule buyer— just the kind of man Norfleet had known and worked with all his life, a straight shooter who finalized deals with a handshake and a promise. Hamilton introduced him to a W.B. Spencer, who expressed an interest in buying Norfleet’s farm. 

While discussing the deal, Norfleet and Spencer happened across a “lost” wallet stuffed with cash belonging to a man named J.B. Stetson, aka Big Joe Furey. Furey tried to give Norfleet and Spencer  $100 as a reward for returning his wallet. Spencer took the money. Norfleet, of course, wouldn’t hear of it. 

Furey, posing as a stockbroker, asked Norfleet if it was okay for him to invest the $100 in stocks under Norfleet’s name. Norfleet said that would be fine by him. That $100 turned into $800 after a single day and soon multiplied to $28,000, a truly staggering sum of money in 1919. 

Ah, but there was a catch. There always is. A man named E.J. Ward introduced himself to Norfleet as the director of the stock exchange. He said the exchange had to keep the $28,000 until Norfleet could establish the proper credit, which turned out to be $45,000 (about $800,000 in today’s money.) That matched the number of dollars that Norfleet had managed to save in his 54 years on earth. He fell for the same scam again, a few days later, this time with a phony local exchange. The scam concluded with Furey and his cohorts skipping town with Norfleet’s life savings along with  the money he’d borrowed from a bank and a brother-in-law.

Grifters have a saying: “The sucker never squeals.” The maxim holds that suckers are too embarrassed to squeal; they don’t want anybody to know. Norfleet wasn’t the typical sucker. He squealed to anyone who would listen, acknowledging up front his membership in the “one-born-every-minute brigade.” 

First, he told his story to the Associated Press, which led directly to the capture of two of the bunco men. Norfleet then set out to find Furey and the others. He spent all his remaining dollars, borrowed some more, and traveled from California to Florida and from Mexico to Montreal. He used various disguises and posed as a cotton farmer from Ferris, Texas one time, a celery grower from Florida the next, and a gullible sucker-in-waiting every time. 

In time Norfleet became as good or better at the con than the men who absconded with all his money. One by one he tracked Furey and each of his accomplices to specific places at specific times. The bunco men all went to trial and they all went to jail except for the one who chose suicide over prison. 

Norfleet wrote a book, Norfleet, about his exploits in 1924. In 2010, author Amy Reading wrote The Mark Inside about Furey and Norfleet along with a brief history of scams. She acknowledged that just the verifiable parts of Norfleet’s tale make a hell of a story, but she also makes it clear that Norfleet conned his readers too, at least a little.

Norfleet didn’t get paid for his detective work. He and Lizzy downsized to a smaller ranch where the couple stayed until they moved into the small town of Hale Center in 1990. Norfleet was 102 when he died in 1967.