‘Smith is killed,’ someone cried. The news spread, probably with greater speed than wildfire could have traveled through the neither warm nor dry environs of Skagway, Alaska, on the night of July 8, 1898. About half a dozen of the men who had, in their way, helped make Jeff Smith — better known as Soapy Smith — the most prosperous and influential citizen in Skagway ran to tell their friends the awful news, and then to get out of town — fast.

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The man who, by his presence, had brought about a reign of terror in Skagway, began his life in a most unlikely environment for someone whose future claim to fame would rest on his ability to raise the professions of graft and petty theft to legendary heights. Born in 1860 to a prominent and reputable family in Noonan, Ga., Jefferson Randolph Smith Jr. grew to be a tall, handsome, suave, soft-spoken and well-dressed young man. His father, Jefferson R. Smith Sr., was a lawyer, as would be two of his brothers. Three of Jeff Junior’s other brothers were doctors, one a minister and one a farmer.

Like many Southerners after the Civil War, Jeff Smith’s father sought new opportunities by taking his family west, to Round Rock, Texas, in 1876. There, he established a new law business while Jeff himself took up his first — and last — honest employment, becoming a salesman.

Not long after the Smith family’s arrival in Texas, Jeff’s mother died. Also, sometime between 1876 and 1879, when he first turned up in Denver, Colo., Jeff began to make the transition from honest to not-so-honest salesman. He was also known to excel in card games and the thimble rig — manipulating a pea within three thimbles and betting on which one it was under. Neither form of gambling was worthy of the title ‘game of chance’ when Soapy was playing.

By 1883, Smith was making a tidy profit by selling soap to miners all over Colorado — earning the catchy nickname of ‘Soapy’ Smith. What made personal hygiene so attractive to the miners when Smith was in town was his announcement that one out of 10 of the nickel cubes of soap that he was selling for $5 apiece featured a double wrapping, the inner of which was anything from a $20- to a $50 bill. Soapy made a great show of wrapping the prizes into the packages; what the miners didn’t see was that same money disappearing back into his pocket by sleight-of-hand.

In 1885, Smith settled down to practice his favorite bunco game in the growing metropolis of Denver, where his ambitions soon broadened. He invested his profits in a gambling hall — the Tivoli Club — and set his sights on skimming the cream off every illegal undertaking in town. That required an organization, but by then Soapy knew where to find the talent — men of the caliber of ‘Judge’ Norman Van Horn and Syd Dixon, both disbarred lawyers with a command of quasi-legalese that could baffle a Harvard graduate, and ‘the Reverend’ Charles Bowers, a pious, benign-looking professional shill whose means of gaining a stranger’s trust included a back pocket full of Masonic and other organizational paraphernalia, from which he would draw according to what a quick study of the potential victim would reveal to him. Smith also enlisted a motley assortment of pickpockets, muggers and burglars to serve as lawmen — upholding his brand of self-serving law and order by bribing politicians, stuffing ballot boxes and, as necessity demanded, dealing out bodily injury. The lieutenant that Soapy put in charge of this muscle was a diminutive but hard-boiled egg named ‘Ice Box’ Murphy, a former road companion of the famous hobo ‘A-Number One.’ John W. Murphy’s nickname sprang from a past attempt to dynamite the safe in a darkened meat market — only to have his safecracking career stopped cold upon discovering that he had blown up the cooler instead.

Soapy continued to get into trouble with the law, but he invariably slithered his way out with some of the most cynical, twisted rhetoric that ever swayed a jury. After he swindled two visitors to the Tivoli Club out of $1,500, Smith was taken to court. Speaking in his own defense, Soapy stated that his gambling hall was, in fact, an institution of public education, designed to cure the compulsive gambler of his urge, just as the Keely Institute treated alcoholics. Smith concluded by pointing out to the court that his two victims had sworn never to gamble again. ‘I should be recognized as a public benefactor,’ he declared. ‘Praise, instead of censure, should be our portion.’ Smith was not praised, but he was acquitted.

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