The Effect
It is the 28th July 1891. In the heart of the French Riviera, at the Monte Carlo Casino, a playground for the world’s elite, a middle-aged man of unassuming appearance walks in. He crosses the gleaming floor of the atrium, past twenty-eight iconic marble pillars, and steps into the Salle Mauresque—the Moorish Room. It’s a dazzling place, walls covered with mirrors, magnificent chandeliers hanging from a gilded ceiling. The man walking through the casino is Charles Deville Wells.
Wells quietly finds a place at a roulette table and begins to play. For eleven solid hours, he sits there, never taking a break for food or drink. It isn’t long before his table becomes the centre of attention. A crowd has formed, their murmuring turning into gasps of astonishment as they witness a man who simply cannot lose.
The rules of roulette are simple. A croupier spins a large wheel in one direction and a small ball in the opposite. The wheel is divided into numbered pockets, each either red or black, with the exception of a green pocket for the number 0. Players place bets on where they believe the ball will land, from simple 50/50 chances on red or black, to the high-payout long shot of a single specific number.
The odds are stacked against any player long-term. Yet, for Charles Wells, the improbable became reality. The crowd around his table grew to be eight ranks deep, a chaotic crush of spectators shoving one another to get a better view, desperate to copy his bets. The casino’s own chef de partie, a man named Bertollini, later described the scene: “They crowded round his table… and all wanted to play the same numbers he did… That led to new violent clashes”.
Amidst the growing pandemonium, Wells remained the only calm person in the room. Coolly, he “broke the bank,” a term that signifies a player winning more than the entire cash reserve at a single gaming table. This wasn’t a one-off stroke of luck; over the course of his four day stay, Wells managed to break the bank ten times. He walked away with a staggering one million francs, an astronomical sum at the time. He would later return to the casino and win another million.
The news of Wells’s streak made world headlines. He became an international celebrity, his feat immortalized in the popular song, “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.” The public was captivated by the romantic notion of a quiet man who had beaten the odds, a working-class hero who had outsmarted the millionaires’ playground. The casino itself, baffled and suspicious, could find no evidence of foul play. So theories amassed. Was it just a miracle of luck? A supernatural gift? Or was something else, something more earthly, at play?
The Method
While the world was enchanted by the spectacle of Charles Wells, the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo, a closer examination of his life reveals a far less magical, and far more duplicitous, reality.
His list of fraudulent enterprises is extensive. In Paris, he was convicted for a scheme involving a fictitious railway project. Back in London, he masterminded a patent fraud, taking money from investors—including a judge’s daughter and an Irish aristocrat—for inventions like a “musical skipping rope,” only to disappear with their funds. His most audacious scam came years later, under the alias “Lucien Rivier,” when he established a private bank in Paris. Promising an impossible 1% interest per day, he swindled thousands of investors out of what would be millions of pounds today. The scam was so vast that when he vanished, it caused a public outcry and an international manhunt.
So, how did he do it? How did this career criminal pull off one of the most famous gambling feats in history? Over the years, four main theories have emerged.
Theory one: He was simply lucky. This is the romantic notion, the one the public wanted to believe. And statistically, it’s not impossible. Every day, somewhere in the world, incredible coincidences occur. But for a man who built his life on calculated deception, relying on pure chance seems… out of character.
Theory two: He used a strategy. Wells himself claimed to have perfected an “infallible system,” a mathematical betting system, called a martingale that made winning a certainty. He even used this claim in court. However, mathematicians agree that no betting system can truly overcome the house advantage in roulette over the long term. It’s far more likely that his talk of a “system” was just another con—a story to lure in backers for his gambling and, later, a defence for his frauds.
Theory three: He spotted a biased wheel. This is a more plausible technical explanation. An English engineer named Joseph Jagger had successfully exploited a wheel’s bias at the same casino years earlier, winning a fortune by tracking which numbers came up most frequently. With his own engineering background, Wells was certainly capable of doing the same. But there’s a major flaw in this theory. The casino was well aware of this vulnerability. By the 1890s, they had started shifting the wheels between tables nightly, making it almost impossible for a player to track a single wheel’s bias long enough to profit from it. For Wells to win so consistently, for so many days, the casino would have had to not be changing the placement of the roulette wheels. Why would they make such a mistake?
This brings us to the final, most audacious theory, the one that ties all the loose ends together.
Theory four: He was in collusion with the casino. What if the casino knew a wheel was biased and let Wells exploit it deliberately? At the time, the casino’s director, Camille Blanc, was in a desperate position. The new ruler of Monaco, Prince Albert, had a moral objection to gambling and was threatening to shut the casino down. Blanc desperately needed a spectacular publicity stunt. What better advertisement than an ordinary man achieving an “impossible” win? In fact, the inventor Sir Hiram Maxim, a regular at the casino, once witnessed the staff stage a bank-breaking for two other players, admitting it was “done for effect.” Could Charles Wells be the star of a much grander, and mutually profitable, performance, with a biased wheel left in play just for him?
Theories aside, Wells’ luck, unsurprisingly, ran out. After his famous streak, he returned to the casino and lost a significant sum. And his life did not end in luxury. However, his final years contained a final con - the popular (and probably most palatable) story was that Charles lost all his winnings and died in “abject poverty.” This however is not what really happened. Following his final prison sentence, a court granted him a comfortable annual income from annuities he had bought with his ill-gotten gains. He died in a respectable lodging house in Chelsea, London, in 1922.
The man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo did so not with mystical powers, but with a carefully calculated plan, one that was as audacious and fraudulent as the rest of his notorious career.
© 2025, Lora Jones. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without written permission.
