In December 1912, the last thing a janitor at a public restroom in Denver expected to find littering the floor was a stamped envelope addressed to the Men’s Room. The envelope had been delivered by the postman earlier that day for whoever might be expecting it.
In the janitor’s hands, the envelope with crude scrawl begged to be opened. He obliged. What he found inside was far stranger than anything he could have imagined. Not a misaddressed love letter or news from afar, but the details of a plot by unnamed conspirators to dynamite the Denver Mint and make off with as much gold as they could carry.
Federal authorities took the threat seriously. Guards on staff at the mint were doubled. Nightly police patrols were expanded. Other measures aimed at bolstering the government strongbox were taken.
News of the daring plot was kept under wraps and out of the papers, though not for long. A reporter at The Denver Post got his hands on the story and ran the shocking headline, proudly outpacing The Rocky Mountain News, the paper to which The Denver Post was rapidly losing subscribers. It was a big win for the reporter, who was known only as “Reddy-Ink” and had no other stories attributed to him.
The next two weeks passed without incident.
Conversations were had between the chief of police, the postmaster, the men who served as the director and the superintendent of the Denver Mint, and authorities from Washington, D.C. Concerns that the unnamed conspirators would follow through with their plan were quickly waning. Perhaps they had witnessed the enhanced security measures at the mint and determined pulling off the robbery would be impossible.
Or perhaps the threat had never been real.
It became apparent the letter found by the janitor on the floor of the public restroom was fake. What didn’t make sense was why someone would manufacture the ruse and what they stood to gain from it.
Lingering on these questions, the postmaster recalled seeing a headline months earlier in The Denver Post about a plot to blow up the county jail. It was later debunked. Months before that, the paper splashed a story on the front page about a scheme to burn down the Denver auditorium. That one also turned out to be phony. In both cases, reporters from The Denver Post were the only reporters to get the scoop.
Attention was turned to the newspapermen at The Denver Post. No one stood to gain more from the plot to dynamite the mint than they did. They were desperate to boost the paper’s dwindling readership and had already printed stories about daring conspiracies that were later reported to be fake. It was a creative tactic for attracting subscribers, but the jig was up. The Rocky Mountain News printed a story revealing the ruse:
The well-laid plot to dynamite the Denver Mint, heralded in flaring headlines in The Denver Post and hawked excitedly through the streets, was a raw fake manufactured in the office of the Post. The daring conspiracy was hatched in the fertile mind of a bright Post reporter… It is the same old Post stunt of hatching pure fakes to offset the legitimate scoops The Rocky Mountain News puts out day after day and in the hope of bolstering a rapidly diminishing circulation. (The Rocky Mountain News, December 20, 1912)
With fears of an attack on the Denver Mint lifted, life at the mint went back to normal. Excitement like that wouldn’t be seen again until ten years later, when armed robbers held up a Federal Reserve Bank truck in front of the mint and made off with $200,000. After exchanging gunfire with the guards and shooting out windows at the mint, the bandits snatched their loot and sped off down Colfax Avenue.
