(Duncan Renaldo aka: The Cisco Kid)
As a follow-up to our earlier blog post about Pancho Barnes and Duncan Renaldo, we ordered the complete Department of Justice pardon file on Renaldo’s immigration case from the National Archives and reviewed all 169 pages. Here is what we discovered:
The federal pardon file of Duncan Renaldo tells a story stranger and more moving than the legend: a prosecution that begged for mercy, a Hollywood that rose up, and an orphan who rode out of prison to become “The Cisco Kid.”
By the time the syndicated western “The Cisco Kid” premiered in 1950, the man in the embroidered black bolero jacket seemed like the most American thing on television. He rode a black and white paint horse named Diablo, flashed a grin instead of a gun, and taught a generation of children that the good guy wins by outsmarting the villain, not by shooting him. What those children could not have known was that the actor playing their hero had once sat in a federal penitentiary as prisoner No. 10995, a man whose citizenship the United States government listed, in his own clemency petition, with a single bewildered word: UNKNOWN.
His story survives in an extraordinary place: the Department of Justice Pardon Attorney’s file, case 57-665, preserved at the National Archives. One hundred sixty-nine pages of telegrams, affidavits, prison reports, and pleading letters, it is the paper trail of a life that began in mystery and nearly ended in exile. Read together, the documents tell a story more remarkable than any of the legends that grew up around it.
An orphan of no known country
Duncan Renaldo never knew his parents. His first memories were of being shuttled among families in Romania, a boy who spoke English but not Romanian even after eight years in the country, teased by the other children who called him “the American.” The families who raised him offered only fragments: that he came from somewhere in America, from a place whose name he could match, years later, only to Camden, New Jersey. In a statement he dictated from his prison cell, he described the weight of it plainly: “the misery of nonidentity,” he wrote, “is colossal and extremely hard to bear.”
He went to sea, and the sea delivered him to America. In 1921, at about seventeen, he arrived at Baltimore as a coal passer aboard the vessel Puget Sound, on which he had shipped at Dunkirk, France. Granted a temporary seaman’s permit, he never returned to the ship. He dug house foundations in Van Cortlandt Park, worked an electric fixture plant in Brooklyn and a hat factory in Yonkers, swept studio floors at Tec-Art, painted portraits, papered tenement walls. In 1922 he enlisted in the 71st Regiment of the New York National Guard, swore the ‘Oath of Allegiance,’ served three years, and was honorably discharged. He also did something few illegal entrants would dare: he went to Camden, again and again, hunting the city hall records and knocking on the doors of Federal Street, searching for the family he believed was his. Two elderly sisters, the Misses Riesman of 216 Federal Street, remembered a family of Duncans next door around 1900. It was a thread, and he clung to it for the rest of his life.
By 1928 the floor sweeper had become a leading man. MGM signed him to a long term contract, cast him in “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” and then handed him what the United States Attorney would later call his big chance: the male lead in “Trader Horn,” the studio’s grand African adventure and the first major Hollywood feature shot on that continent.
Three days, thirty passports, and a rubber stamp
The catastrophe, when it came, arrived not as villainy but as studio efficiency. MGM gave Renaldo three days’ notice for Africa. He was shooting retakes on one picture, testing for another, and receiving a battery of tropical inoculations. The studio told him it would handle passports and transportation for the entire company, roughly thirty people, and that all he had to do was go sign some papers at the clerk’s office. He did, and left for the set.
What the government’s own lawyers later found in that application is astonishing. Where the applicant is required to sign in his own handwriting, the form bears a rubber stamp reading “Renaldo, Duncan,” the name reversed, as no man carries a stamp of his own name backwards. It states his father was Scotch and born in Spain, a claim Renaldo never made anywhere in his life. It omits the wife and child he plainly had. The information, prosecutors concluded, had been lifted wholesale from the MGM publicity department, whose job was inventing romantic biographies. But the form also declared him a native citizen of the United States, born in Camden, New Jersey, and above the studio’s stampwork sat his genuine sworn signature.
The unraveling was driven, the file shows, less by the government than by his embittered ex-wife, whose affidavits triggered his 1931 immigration arrest days before the “Trader Horn” premiere, and whose campaign against him fills page after page: an alienation of affections suit against his ailing co-star Edwina Booth that collapsed when her own witness produced a signed agreement to split the hoped for $50,000 judgment; an accusation that he had mailed her a six-legged poisonous lizard; charges of threats he could not have made because he was sitting in the county jail when they were allegedly uttered. A federal indictment followed in February 1932. In December a jury convicted him on all three counts: false statements in a passport application, falsely claiming citizenship, and perjury. On January 9, 1933, he was sentenced to two years and a $2,000 fine.
The Ninth Circuit reversed the citizenship count that December, finding the government had produced no evidence at all that he was not a citizen, and severely criticized the prosecution’s star exhibit, a purported Romanian birth certificate, as improperly admitted. But his trial lawyer had failed to object correctly, so the remaining counts stood. The Supreme Court declined the case. On June 18, 1934, Duncan Renaldo voluntarily surrendered to the United States Marshal in Los Angeles and was taken to the federal penitentiary at McNeil Island, Washington.
The prosecution begs for mercy
Then something happened that almost never happens. The men who convicted him became his champions. Fred Horowitz, the special assistant who prosecuted the case and argued the appeal, wrote that Renaldo’s defense attorney had been thoroughly incompetent, that a competent defense would have won acquittal, and that he himself had urged the trial judge to grant probation. United States Attorney Peirson M. Hall read the entire trial transcript and concluded that Renaldo genuinely did not know where he was born and that nothing in the record proved he was not born in the United States. Hall then added a passage of almost startling tenderness for a federal law enforcement officer. Having grown up among orphans himself, he wrote, he understood how an orphan child, surrounded by children with parents and birthplaces, builds a birthplace of his own from fragments given by well-meaning people, and so he could readily understand Renaldo’s belief that he was American, even if Renaldo could not trace its source. Judge George Cosgrave, who had pronounced the sentence, recommended the pardon as well.
Hollywood rose with them. The Screen Actors Guild petitioned the President by order of its board, on letterhead carrying the names of Gary Cooper, Paul Muni, Bela Lugosi, Victor McLaglen, and Boris Karloff. Telegrams poured into the White House in January 1936 from directors Henry King, Louis King, and Malcolm St. Clair. John Ford’s was characteristically economical: no one will oppose it, he wired the President, because he has been sufficiently punished; your mercy will be rewarded. And in a letter that reads today like a calling card from Renaldo’s private life, the Associated Motion Picture Pilots, the stunt fliers’ union founded by the aviator Pancho Barnes, with the legendary Paul Mantz signing as secretary-treasurer, told the President that Renaldo was personally known to every member and entirely worthy of pardon. Barnes was more than a professional ally. She had fallen in love with Renaldo in 1932 and taken him into her San Marino mansion during the worst of the legal siege; the clemency petition itself lists his address as 1350 Garfield Avenue, San Marino, her home. While he served his time, she flew a cross-country promotional tour and worked her formidable roster of government friends on his behalf, and the pilots’ letter in the federal file is the visible fingerprint of that campaign.
Renaldo served nearly the entire sentence. He declined even to apply for parole, in part because his ex-wife had lodged a detainer at the prison expressly to block it. His term, less 144 days earned for good conduct, expired January 25, 1936. Three days later, on January 28, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a full and unconditional pardon. The Department of Justice mailed notifications to every studio chief, editor, and guild officer who had written, and MGM director W.S. Van Dyke’s secretary wrote back that he was deeply grateful for the pardon the President so graciously signed.
There remained one absurdity worthy of the whole affair: the deportation warrant, based not on his conviction but on his visa-less landing in 1921, could not actually be executed. Romania refused to issue a passport for him. The United States had spent years trying to expel a man that no country on earth would claim. Renaldo resolved it himself, crossing into Mexico and re-entering legally as a non-quota immigrant, and on July 11, 1941, he received his final papers as a citizen of the United States. The man without a country finally had one.
Oh, Cisco
The comeback took time. Republic Pictures put him to work in serials and B westerns, and he talked his way into the “Three Mesquiteers” series as its first Latin cowboy. He appeared in “For Whom the Bell Tolls” with Gary Cooper, one of the stars whose guild had petitioned for his freedom. Then in 1945, at Monogram, he found the role of his life: O. Henry’s “Cisco Kid.” Renaldo remade the roguish bandit as a gallant knight errant, modeling him on Don Quixote, drawing on a copy of Cervantes that had been a gift from Pancho Barnes herself.
When the character moved to television in 1950, with the beloved Leo Carrillo alongside as Pancho on his palomino Loco, the producers shot in color in a black and white world, betting on a future they could not yet broadcast. The show ran 156 episodes through 1956 and became one of the most successful syndicated programs of its era. Renaldo was fierce about what it stood for: Cisco and Pancho outwitted their enemies rather than gunning them down, and when the industry drifted toward grittier westerns he dismissed the trend as splashing the western tradition with criminality and barbarism. When a rock fall on location in 1953 put him in the hospital for nine episodes, he recorded his lines from the hospital bed rather than let the show go dark.
He retired to the Santa Barbara area, painted in oils, illustrated a book of poetry, and lived as a local treasure until his death from lung cancer in 1980 at 76. His star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame sits at 1680 Vine Street.
There is a symmetry here no screenwriter would dare invent. The man convicted of claiming to be American spent thirty years playing the most generous version of the American good guy ever broadcast into the nation’s living rooms. And the deepest truth in his file belongs not to the legend but to the prosecutor who put him away and then fought to free him: that a boy with no parents, no country, and no birthplace built himself an identity out of hope and fragments, and that the identity he built, honest, loyal, and kind, turned out to be truer than any document. The country that could not decide whether he belonged got its answer every week at the end of the show, when Cisco and Pancho laughed, wheeled their horses, and rode off having left the world a little better than they found it.
Oh, Cisco. Oh, Pancho.
