First, we should put you straight on one thing. The bank that was broken was not at the Monte Carlo casino in Las Vegas, but rather in Monte Carlo itself, i.e., the small but humongously expensive European principality famed for its casinos, yachts, Grand Prix race, and colorful royal family into which Grace Kelly married, for which the Las Vegas casino was named.
The Las Vegas parallels are striking. In the late eighteenth century, Monte Carlo –- formerly nothing but an undeveloped rocky headland –- became home to the only legal casino in Europe and spent huge amounts glamorizing itself to appeal to the international jet set. It worked and the principality became either the most fashionable place on the Riviera (for which another casino in Vegas is named) or a theme park to vice, depending upon your point of view.
Just like the headline-grabbing gossip-column-filling entity that Las Vegas is today, a hundred years ago British newspapers carried regular reports from Monte Carlo, as if the casino were home to a major sporting event –- much like the World Series of Poker and the household names it’s created here in recent years.
Perhaps the first famous gambler, a chap named Joseph Jagger (said to be a distant cousin to Sir Mick) garnered some publicity in 1873 for "breaking the bank" at the Casino de Monte Carlo. Jagger identified a biased roulette wheel –- i.e. one with a mechanical flaw that meant the numbers didn’t come up randomly –- and before the casino bosses knew what hit them, he’d walked away with the equivalent of $350,000, an enormous sum for those days (not to be sniffed at now, either).
We’re getting ahead of ourselves, however, because the phrase describing what Jagger did came later. To break the bank –- faire sauter (literally, "blow up") la banque, in French –- doesn’t mean to bankrupt the house. But it was an evocative phrase dreamt up by François Blanc, the cunning and PR-savvy owner of the casino.
Enter one Charles Wells, a mysterious Londoner who, in July 1891, embarked on such an incredible winning streak that in no less than 12 times in 11 hours, he won more chips than were available to pay him out with on the roulette table. He finally walked off with over one million francs (about $2,000,000 today).
Rather than beat Wells up, throw him in jail, or at the very least ban him from the casino, as would have been far more likely in most casinos a century later, Blanc recognized the publicity value of the big win and decided to capitalize on it. He instituted a ritual whereby if the bank was "broken" by a player, a black-crepe shroud was placed over it and play transferred to another table, until replacement chips were brought in to pay off the winner. He also hired a bunch of private eyes to try to figure out what the heck the Brit was up to, but could never figure out his system and in November of the same year, Wells returned and won as much money again in three days.
It didn’t take long for news of Wells’ triumph to reach his homeland, where music-hall was all the rage. A songwriter named Fred Gilbert penned a catchy popular song about him called "The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo," which became a worldwide success and is responsible for the phrase entering popular parlance. You can read the full lyrics to the song by clicking here.
That’s pretty much the end of the story, aside from an addendum about Wells himself. While he maintained that he was purely lucky and no cheating scam was ever proven, he did turn out to be a crook in other ways and had raised his gambling bankroll by conning wealthy investors into financing bogus inventions. He served various stints in jail in both his native England and in France, where he emigrated, and eventually died penniless in Paris in 1926.
