John Warne Gates (1855-1911) was renowned as “Bet-a-Million” Gates, a reckless bettor who flinched at no stakes and feared no odds. In 1905, Gates was traveling through Kansas City. He stood on the platform beside his private railroad car, when a gambler asked whether Gates would play a game – any game – with him. Gates replied, “I don’t play for small sums and I’m leaving in five minutes. Show me the money.” The challenger took out 40 $1,000 bills. Gates tossed a $20 gold piece into the air. “Call it,” he said.

“Heads,” the local said. Both looked at Gates’s wrist. “Tails,” Gates grinned. Pocketing the banknotes, he stepped into his car. The loser was left behind in shock as the train pulled away from the station. But he, too, became a celebrity: The man who lost $40,000 in 40 seconds to “Bet-a-Million” Gates.

Born poor in Illinois, Gates, a self-described capitalist, was throughout his life driven by class resentment. In 1873, barbed wire-mill proprietor Colonel Ike Ellison offered Gates a traveling salesman’s job. By day, Gates produced rodeos in dusty cow towns, building arenas of barbed wire that restrained the wildest steers and winning thousands of orders. By night, he doubled and tripled his commissions at poker.

By 1883, the tide had turned. Gates had become Ellison’s boss, a millionaire with his own wire mills, and famous for wagering large stakes on anything, such as $50,000 on which raindrop would first reach the bottom of a windowpane. After reportedly winning $1 million at an English track, the press nicknamed him “Bet-A-Million.”

Gates turned to combining industrial lame ducks into new corporations such as Diamond Match and National Biscuit Company (Nabisco), rigging their balance sheets to overvalue their assets and manipulating stocks prices with inside information. He made yet another fortune from Texas oil drilling, creating what is now Texaco.

But his genius lay in harassing other operators, such as J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie, by buying properties they needed for their own deals and forcing them to buy him out at whatever price he named. Thus, when Morgan and Carnegie needed barbed-wire plants for their newly created steel trust, the U.S. Steel Corp., they had to pay Gates $110 million for his American Steel and Wire Co., which he had assembled with only a few million out-of-pocket.

Their negotiations were complicated by emotion. Gates hated Morgan, a suave, masterful, and secure aristocrat who aroused Gates’s Jacobin instincts. Morgan’s nose was affected by incurable acne rosacea, which left it red and enormously swollen. Gates and his partners stumped into J. P. Morgan & Co. for the final talks, which Morgan had delegated to Elbert Gary, Steel’s president (and, coincidentally, a childhood acquaintance of Gates). Noting the snub, Gates asked Gary, “Where’s Livernose?” Understandably, Morgan refused Gates’s demand for a seat on Steel’s board of directors, saying, “It is impossible. You have made your reputation and we will not be responsible for it. Good day, sir.” Gates needed four days’ serious drinking before recovering his composure.

A squat, even saurian man with a dragoon mustache, his language was coarse and his manners boorish. For Gates, personal relations were a matter of gruff discourtesy, save where a show of politesse or generosity might directly translate into profit. His private life was filled with a succession of whores, “artist’s models,” and actresses.

He rented a suite in the old Waldorf-Astoria for $20,000 a year, purchasing the staff’s discretion with lavish tips, and held court in its oak-paneled Men’s Bar. On days when the market was quiet, he played cards there. Once, needing a fourth at bridge, he invited a casual acquaintance to play, saying casually, “We play for five a point.” At the end of the game, the guest gleefully told Gates he was due $500 at five cents a point. Gates roared with laughter until the tears came, and, still chuckling, wrote him a check for $50,000. Gates had meant $5 a point.

Nearly wiped out in the 1907 stock market crash, Gates bounced back within the year by forcing Morgan to buy out his southeastern railroad interests. Morgan’s bank shamefacedly announced the deal as undertaken “… solely to relieve the general financial condition.” When Gates handed partner Diamond Jim Brady $1.25 million as his share of the profits, Brady announced that he was accepting the money solely to relieve his general financial condition. It was Gates’s last great deal. In 1911, he died suddenly while vacationing in Paris.

Gates’s only son, Charlie, preferred women and wine to business. In 1913, Charlie had a reunion with an old friend, Col. William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody. A single evening with that accomplished drinker was enough. Charlie died aboard his private railroad car the next morning. “I didn’t know he was a tenderfoot,” Cody said. “I never should have ordered those last six bottles.”