The Ballard Roulette Heist
A masked gunman terrorized a Ballard gambling hall, making off with the house cash while twenty players stood frozen in surprise.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Confidence in the honesty of their victims which gamblers display by allowing their winnings to lie exposed on the tables was cruelly abused by a solitary highwayman at Ballard on Thursday night. Shrouding his head in a gunny sack and carrying a revolver, he entered the gambling rooms in the rear of the Villard House about 10 o'clock and, in the presence of twenty astonished players, gathered up the cash from the roulette table and vanished as silently as he had entered. The Villard House is a saloon managed by P. Paulson, and in a back room H. H. Simms, formerly a drayman, runs a crap game and occasionally a poker game, a roulette table and other gambling contrivances. The robber, with a gunny sack perforated with eye-holes placed over his head, coolly and quietly made his entrance among the astonished occupants. He poked a pistol in the face of a man named Johnson, who at first thought it was someone playing a practical joke, until he looked down the barrel. The robber then stepped to the roulette table, picked up nearly all the loose change, amounting to $45, and put it in his pocket before vanishing. The proprietors made no special effort to notify the police, and it was not generally known until yesterday morning that a hold-up had been successfully accomplished in one of the most public places in town.
“He might have made a haul of five times as much if he had taken time to visit the poker room, for there was not a pistol in the house.”
Ballard, now a bustling center of dining and nightlife, was a separate town in 1894 with its own reputation for rowdy saloons. The casual mention of illegal gambling dens operating in the back of neighborhood businesses reflects a time when civic regulation was often as loose as the local ethics.
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