An 1890 painting of three-card monte dealers.

Edward Valentine, better known as the “Chow Chow Man,” was a colorful and controversial Coney Island three-card monte dealer in the latter part of the 19th-century. (He was apparently so nicknamed because he loved chow chow pickle relish.) A paunchy man with bright green spectacles, Valentine would take his cards and a board and set up the game in a heavily trafficked area of the beach and let the suckers come to him. Valentine was regularly arrested for gambling, so there were numerous articles published about him in the New York Times and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which sternly labeled him a public nuisance. But editorial writers seemed to miss his larger-than-life quality the second the Brooklyn character died. An excerpt from an April 28, 1879 piece in the Eagle that recalled the amusing con man:

“Poor old Chow Chow–by another and his own name, Edward Valentine–is dead. The police know it; a good many other people, with more money than brains, know it also. It is not often that a newspaper is called upon to record the demise of a man to whom the world owed so little, who owed himself the world so much, and yet, who was, in his daily life, so close on the line dividing the honest man from the criminal, technically, and who enjoyed such an immunity from legal persecution and prosecution as did the subject of this sketch.

(Image by ZioDave.)

Valentine was a man not intended by Mother Nature for a rascal. He had a large, generous nature, which regarded humanity either in distress or on a spree, as something to which he was necessarily to attach himself, either a as promoter of charity or of good feeling, wherever either might appeal to him. He differed from the ruffian type. Reddy the Blacksmith is recorded as holding the theory that, and as putting it habitually into practice, ‘that a sucker had no right to have any money under any circumstances,’ and it is alleged that no matter what the circumstances were, whether his victim were foe or circumstantial friend, he got his money if he could. That was not the style of Valentine.

He would go to work and with his deft and light fingered art–and art it was, without question, would beat a sucker out of his money, and then if the man was in distress, would not only give it all back to him but go out of his way to do something to help the sufferer.

Of his methods it is not necessary to say anything here. He was a master of the three card monte game. There was nothing in it that he did not possess. All of his points, fine and common, which the professors of the three card art possess were child’s play to him. And he was always willing to show those who knew him how he did it.

A notable instance recurs to memory, when Chow Chow having been in bad luck, or worse, was aided to the extent of a few dollars by well known newspaper men, was asked to show his skill. He promptly responded by throwing his cards around, explaining how his tricks were done, and then ending up by winning drinks all around through an exercise of digital skill which he himself thoroughly delineated.”

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