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Monte Carlo, July 1891. A small, balding Englishman walks into the Casino de Monte Carlo. His name is Charles Wells. He's 50 years old. He's bankrupt. In his pocket, 4,000 lbs, borrowed.
Charles Wells, a bankrupt English engineer, famously broke the Monte Carlo casino 11 times in one night using a mysterious method he never revealed.
Key Takeaways
- Charles Wells used an unknown method to break the Monte Carlo casino multiple times in one night.
- The casino was considered mathematically unbeatable due to the house edge and strict controls.
- Wells was a skilled conman and engineer who leveraged deception and possibly mechanical flaws.
- His method was never discovered, adding to the mystery and legend around his story.
- The event highlighted vulnerabilities in casino operations and the allure of beating the odds.
Summary
- In July 1891, Charles Wells, a bankrupt English engineer and fraudster, entered the Casino de Monte Carlo with borrowed money.
- Wells was known for selling fake patents and defrauding investors but decided to gamble his last funds at the casino.
- The Casino de Monte Carlo was the largest and most secure casino in Europe, with a strong house edge and massive cash reserves.
- Despite the casino's precautions, Wells won continuously, breaking the bank 11 times in 11 hours and winning about 1 million francs.
- His winning streak was statistically improbable and baffled casino staff, players, and later historians.
- Wells refused to reveal his secret method, claiming it was based on mathematics, luck, and patience.
- The casino had previously been broken by Joseph Jagger in 1873, who exploited biased wheels, but by 1891 all wheels were supposedly unbiased.
- Wells' feat became legendary, inspiring songs and widespread media coverage, but the exact technique remained unknown for over 130 years.
- Later research suggested roulette wheels had flaws, but Wells never confirmed any mechanical advantage.
- Wells returned to Monte Carlo later but lost, and he died without revealing his method.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Charles Wells and Monte Carlo Casino
- 01:22Wells' Background and Fraudulent Inventions
- 02:41Arrival at Monte Carlo and Casino Overview
- 04:50Casino's Security and House Edge Explained
- 05:51Previous Casino Breaker: Joseph Jagger
- 07:17Wells' Unbelievable Winning Streak Begins
- 08:38Breaking the Bank Multiple Times
- 09:47Aftermath and Media Frenzy
- 10:57Wells' Refusal to Reveal His Method
- 12:18Legacy and Historical Impact
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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Wells isn't a gambler. He's an engineer, an inventor, a man who sells fake patents to widows in London. Every machine he ever built failed.
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Musical jump rope. Speed regulator. Torpedo for catching fish. But tonight, in 11 hours, he's going to break the biggest casino in Europe 11 times in a row.
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Casino de Monte Carlo, owned by the Blanc family. Guaranteed reserve in every table. Backup vault under the building. A thousand croupiers.
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200 private detectives. The largest cash float in continental Europe. It has never been broken in a single session. Never. By midnight, croupiers will be wheeling cash from the vault on a handcart. By morning, an entire orchestra in London will be writing a
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song about him. And for the next 130 years, no one will figure out how he did it. Because Charles Wells took the method to his grave.
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To understand what happened in that casino, you need to understand the man walking through the door.
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Charles Deville Wells, born 1841, Hertfordshire, England. Raised in Marseille. His father was an English teacher in France.
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Wells called himself an inventor. He had one real patent, 1868, a device for regulating the speed of a ship's propeller. He sold it for 5,000 francs and never invented anything that worked again.
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But he kept calling himself an engineer. For 20 years, that's what he sold, not machines, the idea of machines. A musical skipping rope for children, a torpedo that would shoot underwater and catch fish, a railway that would run
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from Berck-sur-Mer to the coast in record time. A device that controlled steam through music. None of them worked. None of them existed beyond paper, but the patents looked real. The drawings looked real, and Wells was very, very good at talking.
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He'd find an investor, a widow, a retired officer, a small businessman with savings. He'd show them the patent, the diagrams, the numbers. He'd promise 20% returns. They'd give him money to manufacture the prototype. He'd take the money and disappear.
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By 1891, Wells had defrauded so many investors that he was working under fake names from a small office in London. One investor alone, a man named Catt, had given him almost 19,000 pounds. Wells spent it, all of it, on nothing.
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Now he was 50 years old. The investors were closing in. The fake addresses weren't working anymore. He was about to be arrested. He had one move left. A few weeks earlier, another investor, a man we still don't know the name of, had
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given Wells 4,000 pounds for a fuel-saving device. It was the last money Wells would ever raise. He didn't build the device.
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He bought a train ticket to the south of France. To understand why what happened next was impossible, you need to understand the building Wells walked into. The Casino de Monte Carlo, 1891.
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It was the largest casino in the world, owned by the Blanc family. François Blanc had built it from nothing in the 1860s, taking a swamp on the Riviera and turning it into the gambling capital of Europe. By 1891, his son Camille was
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running the operation. The numbers were staggering. 2,000 croupiers and staff. The casino employed more people than the entire principality of Monaco had citizens.
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Every roulette table held 100,000 francs in chips. Behind the cashier, a vault. Inside the vault, gold and notes equivalent to several million francs at any moment. A reserve specifically designed so the house could pay any winner, no matter how big. Because the
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Blancs understood something most casino owners didn't. The house edge on European roulette is 2.7%.
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Over a thousand spins, that 2.7% is mathematics. Inevitable. Unbreakable. So the Blanc family let people win in the short term. Welcomed it.
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Encouraged the press to write about it. There was even a ceremony. When a player won so much that he depleted the entire reserve at a single table, when he broke the bank, the croupiers would stop play. They would lay a black crepe
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cloth over the table. Like a coffin. The orchestra would pause. And the player would be celebrated. It was theater.
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Excellent marketing. Because by the next morning, the table would be restocked. The math would resume. And every gambler in Europe would read about the man who broke the bank.
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Love history? Subscribe to our YouTube channel. And book a train to come try it themselves. Most of them would lose. The casino had been broken before. Joseph Jagger, an English mill engineer, did it in 1873.
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He'd hired six clerks to record every spin of every wheel for weeks. He found one wheel that was slightly off balance, favoring nine specific numbers. He won 300,000 francs in 3 days. The Blancs learned from Jagger.
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They started rotating wheels between tables every night, recalibrating bearings, switching pockets, hiring inspectors to test for bias. By 1891, the management of Casino de Monte Carlo were absolutely confident their wheels were perfectly random. Their reserves were unbreakable. Their math was
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undefeated. And then, a small bald Englishman with no money walked through the door. Late July 1891, around 8:00 in the evening. Wells walks into the Salle Schmidt, one of the smaller, more elegant gaming rooms. Gas chandeliers, velvet curtains, the smell of cigars. He
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sits at a roulette table, buys in for 4,000 pounds, about 100,000 francs at the exchange rate. The croupiers don't recognize him, just another small Englishman in a cheap suit. There are dozens like him in any given week. He starts betting, even
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money bets, red, black, even, odd. Small stakes at first. He wins, loses, wins, loses. Normal pattern. 20 minutes go by.
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Then something starts happening at his table that nobody at Casino de Monte Carlo has ever seen. Wells starts winning, not occasionally, continuously. He wins on red, he wins on black, he wins on even, he wins on the columns. At one stretch, and this
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is the part that historians still cannot explain, he wins 23 out of 30 consecutive spins. The statistical probability of that on a fair wheel is approximately one in 10 million. By midnight, Wells has won the entire reserve at his table, 100,000 francs. A
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croupier walks to the cashier's desk, whispers to the floor manager. The floor manager walks to the cashier. The cashier opens a safe behind the counter, withdraws the secondary reserve. The chips are wheeled back to Wells' table on a trolley. Play resumes. Within an
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hour, Wells breaks it again. The casino's process for broken bank was supposed to happen once a month, maybe twice. The cashiers were not used to running it back-to-back. By the third break, they had to send a messenger to
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the underground vault for more cash. By the fifth, two staff were using a hand cart to wheel sacks of gold and franc notes from the reserve up the marble stairs to the gaming floor. Wells didn't move, didn't take a break, didn't
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eat, didn't drink anything stronger than water. He kept betting, mostly on the same colors, sometimes switching, doubling on certain numbers, then walking the bets back. There was no obvious system that any croupier could write down. By 3:00 in the
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morning, the table around him is surrounded. Word has spread through the entire casino. Players from other rooms walk over to watch. The orchestra in the main hall has stopped playing because half the audience has left.
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Camille Blanc himself is sent for. He arrives in evening dress, stands behind the table, watches. By 6:00 in the morning, Charles Wells has broken the bank 11 times. He has won in 11 hours 1 million francs. In today's money,
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depending on how you calculate it, between 4 and 6 million dollars. The largest single session win in the history of the casino. The croupier slowly draws the black crepe cloth across the table, 11th time that night.
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Well
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By the time the next train left Monte Carlo, every newspaper in Europe had a reporter on it. Within 48 hours, the story was on the front page of every British, French, and German daily paper.
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The Times, Le Figaro, Berliner Tageblatt. The man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo. The Casino de Monte Carlo had a problem bigger than the million francs. Because if Wells had figured out a system that worked, [music] and the casino couldn't explain how, it
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threatened the entire mathematical foundation the business was built on. So, Camille Blanc did what any [music] rational casino owner would do. He hired investigators.
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Within a week, two private detectives were following Wells, watching where [music] he ate, where he slept, who he met with. They found nothing. No co-conspirators, no signals, no devices, [music] no suspicious meetings.
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Reporters were dispatched to the casino floor. They watched Wells's [music] old seat. They watched the wheels. They interviewed the croupiers. They wrote in their dispatches that they could detect no obvious pattern in his bets. Wells himself sat for an interview with a
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London paper. They asked him how he did it. He told them he had developed an infallible system. He refused to describe it. He said it was based on mathematics, and luck, and patience. He said anyone could do it, given enough
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time. The casino didn't believe him. Neither did the reporters. Neither did the gamblers reading the papers. But, there was nothing they could prove. So, Camille Blanc made a decision that, looking back, seems insane. He let Wells come back.
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In November of 1891, 4 months after the first session, Wells returned to Monte Carlo. He sat at the same table, bought in for a similar amount, and he did it again. He broke the bank. By the most reliable count, six more times. Walked
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away with another large fortune. Some sources say eight breaks, some say 10. The Blancs let it happen because they had calculated something the public hadn't. Every newspaper article about Wells brought [music] 10,000 new gamblers to Monte Carlo.
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Every broken bank headline was free advertising worth more than the million francs Wells had taken. The Blanc family [music] did not chase him out. They put his picture in their own promotional materials. They mentioned him in interviews. Wells was the best marketing
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they'd ever had. But Camille Blanc was still watching, waiting, because he was certain, absolutely certain, that Wells had a method. And he was right. The detectives never found it. The reporters never found it. The croupiers never found it. Because Wells was an engineer,
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and the casino had been broken once before by another English engineer 18 years earlier. Joseph Jagger. The wheels. Wells had likely done what Jagger did. Watched, recorded for days, maybe weeks before that first session, an inconspicuous bald Englishman had
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probably been sitting in the rooms with a notebook, watching wheels, tracking which numbers came up too often, looking for the same flaw Jagger had found in 1873.
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A wheel with a slightly worn bearing. A pocket cut a fraction of a millimeter too deep. A floor that had settled at an angle of half a degree. In Madrid, exactly 100 years later, a man named Gonzalo Garcia Pelayo would do the same
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thing. Sit with a notebook, track 30,000 spins, find the biased wheel, [music] break the bank at Casino Grand Madrid for over 1 million euros. Garcia Pelayo would explain his method openly. He would write a book about it. He would
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say on Spanish television, Roulette wheels are man-made. Man-made things have flaws. Wells never said any of that. In January of 1892, he came back to Monte Carlo a third time. This time he lost 100,000 francs and he never went
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back. While Wells was preparing his third Monte Carlo trip, something else was happening in London. A music hall composer named Fred Gilbert was reading the newspapers about Wells. The story had been everywhere for 6 months. The bald Englishman who [music] broke the
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casino 11 times in one night. Gilbert sat down at a piano, wrote a song.
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As I walk along the Bois de Boulogne with an independent air, you can hear the girls declare, "He must be a millionaire." You can hear them sigh and wish to die. [music] You can see them wink the other eye at
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the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo. He took the song to a music hall singer named Charles Coborn. Coborn bought it for 10 pounds and then Coborn performed it.
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He performed it in London, in Paris, in Berlin, in New York, in Vienna, St.
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Petersburg, Sydney. He sang it in 14 languages. He sang it over a quarter of a million times in his [music] life. By the spring of 1892, every street performer in Europe was playing it on accordions and pianos. It was sung in
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pubs from Glasgow to Naples. American newspapers wrote that the song was unavoidable in any major city. It became the most popular song of the [music] decade. The BBC still has Coborn's original 1903 recording in its archives.
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You can listen to it. The song is still in print. I've just come here from Paris from the sunny southern shore. I to Monte Carlo went William Potter sings it in Lawrence of Arabia. You can hear other girls
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declare he must be It's in Alien Covenant. The man who broke the bank in Monte Carlo.
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For 130 years, the chorus, The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, has never stopped circulating somewhere [music] in the world.
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And Charles Wells, alive in 1892, watching this song explode across Europe, was furious because Fred Gilbert hadn't paid him a penny. Wells had become the most famous gambler in the world. The Blanc family was using him in their marketing. Music halls were
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playing him every night. Reporters were following [music] him through Paris. But he hadn't won at Monte Carlo for 6 months. The money from the first two sessions was running out. The third session had [music] cost him. And his
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old life, the fake patents, the defrauded widows, the angry investors, was catching up. Wells made a calculation that would destroy him.
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[music] He decided to use the fame. He decided to become an investment opportunity. He had a yacht built, a big one. He renamed it the Palais Royal. He sailed it around the French and English coasts. He started telling investors he was about
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to launch the largest steam shipping company in Europe, [music] backed, of course, by his Monte Carlo fortune. The investors gave him money, a lot of it. And Wells did exactly what Wells had always done.
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[music] He spent it. In late 1892, two French detectives boarded the Palais Royale in the harbor at Le Havre. They had been tracking Wells for months. The investors he had defrauded since coming back from Monte Carlo numbered in the dozens. The
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amounts were significant. They arrested him on the deck of his own yacht. Wells was extradited to England, tried at the Old Bailey in March 1893.
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The jury convicted him on 23 [music] counts of fraud, eight years in Portland prison. He served six, came out in 1899, aged, quieter, broke. He moved to Paris, tried to start over. It worked for a while. In 1910, using the alias Lucien
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Rivière, he opened a small private bank in [music] Paris. He promised depositors 365% annual interest, 1% per day. It was the same fraud he had been running his entire life, a patent for a machine that didn't exist, just dressed in different
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clothes. But this time, the fame [music] helped him. 6,000 investors put their savings into his bank, 2 million francs.
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When the French police finally arrested him in January 1912, [music] the assets were gone. Five more years in prison. He came out in 1917.
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He was 76 years old. The First World War was ending. Europe was a different [music] place. Wells lived for five more years in a single rented room in Paris with Jeanette Paris, his much younger companion who had stayed with him
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through the prison sentences. He died in 1922, owing two weeks of rent. He was buried in a pauper's grave. When his body was prepared for burial, the man at the morgue searched his pockets, found nothing, not a franc.
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A hundred years later, in Madrid, Gonzalo Garcia Pelayo was sitting in a casino with a notebook. He had read about Wells.
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[music] Like everyone else, he assumed it had been luck, a statistical fluke, the most extraordinary streak in gambling history, but ultimately random. Garcia Pelayo proved otherwise. He sat in casinos for months, [music] recorded 30,000 spins, found wheels that
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were 1 mm off true, bet only on the biased numbers. He won over a million euros.
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[music] He explained the method openly. He went on Spanish television and showed the math. When asked about Charles Wells, Garcia Pelayo [music] always said the same thing. He said, "Wells was an engineer.
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Engineers don't believe in luck." The Blanc family always suspected the same [music] thing. They never said it publicly. It would have ruined the legend, and the legend was selling Monte Carlo more tickets [music] than the casino itself. But, for 130 years, the
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historical question has stayed open. [music] Did Charles Wells beat Casino de Monte Carlo with mathematics, or with the most extraordinary run of luck in human history?
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The casino's official line was always, "It was luck." Wells's official line, until the day he died in that single rented room in Paris, was that it was a system.
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He never described [music] it, never wrote it down, took it with him. The man who failed at every machine he ever invented, the man who defrauded thousands of investors with patents that never [music] worked, may have invented exactly one thing that did, a method for
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breaking the largest casino in Europe 11 times in 11 [music] hours. And the only thing he ever made that worked, he never sold to anyone.
Topics:Charles WellsMonte Carlo Casinoroulettecasino cheatinggambling historyroulette strategycasino heist19th centurycasino legendroulette wheel bias
