Soapy Smith gambling house. Legend has it that above the entrance of the stairway leading upstairs to the gambling games was a sign that read "caveat emptor", Latin for "let the buyer beware". Smith's younger brother, Bascomb Smith, joined the gang and operated a cigar store that was a front for dishonest poker games and other swindles, operating in one of the back rooms. Other operations included fraudulent lottery shops, a "sure-thing" stock exchange, fake watch and bogus diamond auctions, and the sale of stocks in nonexistent businesses. Because of bribes, some of the police officers patrolling the streets would not arrest
Beware the Cat had originally intended. An abridged and rewritten version in modern English by David Haden, was published in his "Tales of Lovecraftian Cats" (2010) along with Haden's adaptations of public domain horror stories by other authors. Beware the Cat Beware the Cat (1561) is a short English novel (or is that "novella"?) written by the printer's assistant and poet William Baldwin (sometimes called Gulielmus Baldwin), in early 1553. It is notable as the first horror fiction text longer than a short story and has also been claimed by some academics as the first novel ever published in English of any kind.