3. Soapy decided to make himself respectable in Denver
Con men running both short cons, like the soap scam, and more complex long cons, usually stayed on the road. There was always the possibility one of the victims would realize they had been had. Personal revenge or the intrusion of legal authorities was the result, both of which the con man wished to avoid. In Denver, Soapy arrived with sufficient funds to ingratiate himself with the authorities at City Hall. Denver had no restrictions on gambling, so Soapy and the men he hired hustled card and dice games in the city, with Soapy collecting much of the money won by the men he employed. He ran the soap scam as well.
He also expanded his fraudulent methods of convincing miners and others to hand their money over to him. He created a false stock exchange. When it was revealed to be fraudulent, he shut it down and created another. He opened lottery offices, selling tickets for drawings in which there was no winner. He organized the men under him in a manner which was similar to that used by the Chicago gangs in the following century. By the 1880s Smith operated a criminal empire, controlled most of the crime in Denver, and helped suppress the crime which occurred without his sanction.