Charles Deville Wells: The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo

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The man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo is remembered through a music hall hit, a 1935 film, and a stage musical. The real Charles Deville Wells was a serial fraudster. Born in Hertfordshire in 1841 and raised in France, he grew up fluent in two cultures and able to vanish across the Channel whenever one country grew too hot. He was also a real engineer: in 1868 he invented a device to regulate ship propellers and sold the patent for 5,000 francs, about five times his yearly salary. This episode argues that the windfall taught him selling an invention was easier than building one.

What followed was a phantom French railway in 1879, bogus patents sold to British aristocrats, and then the 1891 run at the roulette tables that made him a legend. The episode explains what breaking the bank really meant, follows the winnings into a yacht with a ballroom for 50 guests, and tracks his arrest, his years in Portland Prison, and a final Paris scheme that ran a Ponzi operation a decade before Charles Ponzi.

• Each Monte Carlo table started the day with a reserve of 100,000 francs. When a player emptied it, staff draped the table in black cloth until fresh funds arrived from the vaults.
• One British backer of his fake inventions lost the equivalent of nearly 1.9 million pounds in today's money.
• Convicted at the Old Bailey in March 1893 on 23 counts of fraud, Wells was sentenced to eight years and served six.
• In prison he spent two days in solitary for giving a loaf of bread to another inmate, and later played The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo on the chapel organ.
• In 1910, as Lucien Rivier, he opened a Paris bank promising 1 percent a day and took two million francs from 6,000 investors, prompting France to tighten vetting of private bank owners.