Before it was ever put on display, letters secretly written by Barnum were sent to New York newspapers from various southern cities mentioning that a British naturalist named Dr. Griffin (who was in reality his associate Levi Lyman) had in his possession a mermaid supposedly captured near the “Feejee Islands.” Barnum then set up “Dr. Griffin” in a New York hotel and arranged for reporters to come and see for themselves this remarkable specimen. Meanwhile, Barnum wrote, “while Lyman was preparing public opinion on mermaids at the Pacific Hotel, I was industriously at work (though of course privately) in getting up wood-cuts and transparencies, as well as a pamphlet, proving the authenticity of mermaids.”
Barnum took a mermaid woodcut to each of the New York newspapers and offered it to them for free. Most printed it on July 17, 1842. He also distributed ten thousand copies of the mermaid pamphlet throughout the city. Then, with the public’s interest aroused, Lyman, posing as “Dr. Griffin,” exhibited the bogus specimen at Concert Hall on Broadway and discoursed on its rare place in nature. A week later, the “mermaid” was transferred over to Barnum’s museum with great fanfare and presented “without extra charge.” Paid attendance at the museum nearly tripled.
After many years of success with other entertaining hoaxes, in the fall of 1869 the “Prince of Humbugs” discovered someone competing for his crown. His name was George Hull, and the fraud he perpetrated rivaled any Barnum had ever produced. Hull buried a huge figure of a man carved out of gypsum on his cousin’s farm in upstate New York. He was inspired, he said, by an argument he had with an evangelical preacher who maintained that giant men once roamed the earth because the Bible said they did. The statue was a sensation when Hull arranged for its “discovery” a year after its burial. Huge crowds came to see the “Cardiff Giant,” as it was called, and paid handsomely for the privilege. “As one looked upon it he could not help feeling that he was in the presence of a great and superior being,” wrote one reporter. “The crowd as they gathered around it seemed almost spellbound. There was no levity.” But there was controversy. Some said the figure was a fossilized human thousands of years old. Others claimed that it was an ancient statue. Then there were those who dismissed it as a total fraud.
Word of the discovery quickly reached Barnum, who was always on the lookout for curiosities that generated cash. He knew the Cardiff Giant was a winner, and offered a generous sum to buy it. (Hull had by then sold the giant to new owners.) He was rebuffed, but not deterred. Instead of walking away from such a potential bonanza, Barnum simply had another statue carved and called it the real Cardiff Giant. He displayed it at Wood’s Museum in New York at the same time the original was in town, and often outdrew his competitors.2 They filed for an injunction, but a circuit court judge refused to stop Barnum from essentially out-hoaxing his rivals. When one of the investors in the original fraud observed the lines of people waiting to see Barnum’s copy, he reportedly remarked, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Ironically enough, Barnum stole credit for that memorable line, too.
4
Unreal Estate
Unlike P.T. Barnum, who essentially tricked people in order to entertain them, confidence men like Oscar Hartzell sought only to fleece the unwary with their schemes. Although few today would recognize his name, Hartzell remains one of history’s greatest scam artists. Early in the twentieth century, he convinced as many as one hundred thousand of his fellow midwesterners to hand over millions with the promise of enormous profits from the imaginary estate of the famed British buccaneer Sir Francis Drake. So convincing was his ruse that even after his arrest and conviction many of his investors refused to believe he was a fraud. Instead, they made him their hero.
Hartzell didn’t originate the Drake estate fraud. In fact, he was first conned by two hucksters who convinced him the Drake venture was legitimate. A true believer, he worked for them, in exchange for bogus shares, until he got wise and eventually stole their scheme right out from under them. He made it his own, with bold flourishes impossible to believe—almost. The gist of it was this: Drake, who had made a fortune during the Elizabethan era by robbing Spanish ships of their treasure, left a vast estate of property, gold, and other valuable assets when he died in 1596. There were said to be irregularities in his will, however, which formed the foundation of the con. While other schemers merely found Drakes in the phone book and advised them they were potential beneficiaries of a rich estate that could be recovered only with their contributions, Hartzell actually claimed that he was the sole heir of the fortune, having been assigned that right by a Drake descendant, “Colonel Drexel Drake.” He was engaged to the colonel’s niece, he explained, and was assigned all rights as heir because of the colonel’s desire to keep the estate in the family. Investors, Hartzell wrote from England, stood to earn staggering returns once the Drake estate was turned over to him:
Figure up all the land in Missouri, Kansas, and Iowa at an average of $125 an acre, and all of the stocks, and all the bank deposits, all the railroads and cities in those three states and add them together and the combined amount would not be as large as the Sir Francis Drake estate here in England, of which I am the sole owner, and to which I hold the sole title, which the British parliament is now conveying to me in cash, and which I am going to bring to America to distribute among the men and women who have advanced me money with which to carry on the [effort] to win this estate. . . . I will put it to you in another form: it has been said by people of high finance here in London that the amount I am to receive from the sale of the Drake [estate] is considerably more than the combined debt of Britain to the United States, and the debts of all other countries to Great Britain, and that, as you can read for yourselves, is over four and a half billion pounds sterling, or some 20 billion dollars, a stake worth fighting for and working for and waiting for.
As the money poured in from the American heartland, Hartzell lived lavishly in London, from where he ran the con safely isolated from eager investors and U.S. law alike. Once bankrupt, the failed farmer and rancher now dressed in the finest suits, dined in the most expensive restaurants, and mingled with the English elite. He even styled himself the Baron of Buckland, a title he said became his when “Colonel Drake” assigned him his rights as Sir Francis’s heir. This, along with all other rights, had been confirmed by the “King & Crown Commission,” which, though it didn’t actually exist, was described by Hartzell as Britain’s highest court. Investors ate it right up.
Of course, without an actual Drake estate, it was impossible for Hartzell to give his backers anything but hope. He kept them at bay with promises that the great fortune was almost ready to be distributed. First, though, there were complex audits and accounting procedures that had to be completed. The estate was enormous, after all, with properties that extended all the way from central London to South America. And three centuries’ worth of income and interest couldn’t be sorted through overnight. As time went on, Hartzell, out of necessity, became more and more inventive with his excuses.
“The King of England has been working upon the transfer of these titles to me until he has been stricken down with sickness,” he wrote to his U.S. agents in 1926, “and we must wait until he recovers to resume work, and this waiting takes money, so tell our people in the West who have so nobly contributed of their funds in the past that the machinery must not stop over here now, but they must send more money, and keep on sending it, until the transfers are made. I must have $6,000 more by the end of the month, without fail.”
Amazingly enough, the money kept coming, in ever increasing amounts. Hartzell’s biographer Richard Rayner believes a number of factors contributed to his subject’s extraordinary success. “Like all great con men he was creating theater,” Rayner writes, “a believable yet entirely illusory world, and he plucked its dominant imaginative fabric—the contingency, the chance event—from the air around him.” He heard King George V was sick, for example, and wove that into his deception. Furthermore, Rayner continues, Hartzell wa
s operating at a time in history when Americans were especially receptive to outrageous schemes. “America presupposes an optimistic view of itself and life’s possibilities,” he writes, “especially the possibility of getting rich, and in the 1920s that boisterous self-belief reached a dizzy new height of delusion.” President Calvin Coolidge said at the time, “The business of America is business.” And business was booming. With vast fortunes being made almost overnight, nothing seemed impossible. Sir Francis Drake’s estate appeared to be a safe investment to midwesterners wary of Wall Street, and the stock market crash of 1929 seemed only to deepen their faith. “They now believe in Hartzell with the fire of the most rabid religious fanatics,” an observer wrote.
As he collected a fortune from his worshipful dupes, Hartzell seemed invincible, consistently frustrating the efforts of U.S. officials to stop him. “The swindle was on its face absurd and yet absurdly difficult to disprove,” writes Rayner, “hence its genius.” Nevertheless, there was one man more persistent than most, an inspector for the United States Postal Service named John Sparks. Sparks was eventually able to collect enough evidence of mail fraud to get Hartzell deported from Britain and arrested upon his return to the United States.
During the subsequent trial, which began in Sioux City, Iowa, on October 23, 1933, Hartzell’s flock remained intensely loyal. Woe to anyone who opposed the venerated heir of the fortune that he still promised to share with them. “Hartzell’s campaign had reached evangelistic proportions,” wrote Harry Reed, the U.S. attorney who prosecuted the case. “It was like the Crusades in the Middle Ages. One church fired the preacher because he opposed a contribution. If you did not believe in Oscar Hartzell, you better keep your mouth shut. I talked to hundreds of people who had contributed before, during, and after the trial and I never found anyone who did not think he had made a good investment.”
Hartzell was eventually found guilty, yet no sooner was he out on bail pending appeal than the swindle started anew. Thousands of dollars were raised within days. “The whole Drake deal would have been fixed up by now if it weren’t for that bunch of racketeers they sent over from Washington,” said one disciple. “Those men at the trial are just sore because they can’t get in on it.”
After the conviction was upheld and an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court rejected, Hartzell was hauled off to Leavenworth Prison. His agents, however, continued to solicit funds from the faithful, who happily provided them. As a result, Hartzell was taken from prison and tried again, this time in Chicago along with a number of his accomplices. By now, though, a certain madness seemed to have settled upon the great swindler. He was sent to a prison hospital where he died in 1943, reportedly convinced that he really was the Baron of Buckland and worth billions.
5
Imposter on a Role
Like James Thurber’s fictional character Walter Mitty, Stanley Clifford Weyman sought refuge from his own oppressively ordinary existence by inhabiting other, more interesting lives. Yet what Mitty did only in his daydreams—becoming, by turns, a naval commander, a celebrated surgeon, a criminal attorney, and an ace fighter pilot—Weyman did in reality. This low-level clerk from Brooklyn, born Stephen Weinberg, was a serial imposter, and a very skilled one at that.3
In one of his early acts of imposture, Weyman (the name he always used) became a Romanian army officer serving as his nation’s consul general in New York. One day in 1915, he decided a battle-ship inspection was in order, so he called the U.S. Navy to arrange it. Queen Marie of Romania had instructed him to pay his respects, he claimed, and, as no one questioned his credentials, he was ushered aboard the USS Wyoming, which was anchored in the Hudson River. Sporting a light-blue uniform, decorated with gold braid, and an admiral’s hat, Weyman was escorted by the ship’s captain past rows of sailors standing at attention. Periodically he would pause to reprimand a sailor for smudge on his shoe or for an incorrect stance, never once breaking character.
After the inspection, Weyman announced that he wanted to throw a dinner for the officers at the Astor Hotel in Times Square. Still dressed in his spiffy uniform, he arranged a lavish banquet at the hotel. The bill, he told the manager, was to be sent to the Romanian consulate in Washington, D.C. As Weyman and the officers celebrated, however, the party was interrupted by two detectives who had read an announcement of the event in The New York Times and recognized Weyman’s name from other impostures he had pulled. He was immediately dragged out of the party and arrested. “All I can say,” the captain of the Wyoming later told a reporter, “is the little guy put on one hell of a tour of inspection.”
Weyman served some time in prison before his next caper, which was inspired by an advertisement he saw in the Times seeking a physician to travel to Lima, Peru, to oversee sanitation conditions there for a New York development company. Bolstered by phony credentials and supreme self-confidence, he got the job. Life in Peru was luxurious for “Doctor Weyman.” He rented an estate with a large staff of servants, and spent lavishly on parties and other extravagances—all added to his expense account and sent to New York. When it came to actual work, Weyman got by pretending to know what a sanitation specialist ought to have known, usually nodding in agreement at suggestions made by others that seemed to make sense. Eventually, though, his expense account raised suspicions.
After his ruse in Peru was revealed, Weyman was sent home and in 1921 adopted the role of an official of the U.S. State Department. It was in this guise that he came to the rescue of Princess Fatima of Afghanistan, whose visit to the United States, he read, had not been given any official recognition. Determined to give the princess her due, he swept into her suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and, on behalf of Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, apologized for the poor reception she had received in America. He promised to take Her Royal Highness to Washington to meet the secretary and the president. All he would need from her was $10,000 to pay for the gifts he said foreign dignitaries traditionally gave to officials in the nation’s capital.
Weyman took part of the money and rented a private railroad car to escort Princess Fatima and her party to Washington. When they arrived, he dropped the Afghans off at the Willard Hotel and hurried over to the State Department, dressed as a naval officer. He told an official there that he had been sent by several senators, whom he named, to arrange a visit for the princess with Secretary of State Hughes. Her Highness was accorded all the diplomatic niceties, and during the encounter Weyman took Hughes aside and told him that the princess also wished to meet President Warren Harding. A phone call was made to the White House and a meeting hastily arranged. There Weyman chatted familiarly with the president, something a naval officer would never do, and nudged his way into the photographs Harding took with the princess. This of course raised suspicions, but Weyman had slipped away before his fraud was uncovered.
He next emerged as personal physician to the actress Pola Negri, who was distraught over the recent death of her lover Rudolph Valentino. As poor Pola grieved at the Ambassador Hotel, Weyman announced himself as a doctor and friend of the late screen idol, who, he said, would have wished for him to take care of her. He then proceeded to take her temperature, gave her some sedatives, and suggested he stay with her in an adjoining room. The bereaved actress was most grateful, and as she rested, he issued regular reports of her condition to the press. Then he accompanied her to Valentino’s funeral, which was a scene of chaos as thousands lined up to get a glimpse of the great star in repose. Weyman sensed an opportunity to expand his role. After he returned Pola Negri to her hotel room, he came back to the funeral home, now dressed in full doctor garb, and administered smelling salts and other treatments to Valentino’s swooning fans.
During World War II, “Doctor” Weyman opened a school for draft-dodgers. There he taught cowards how to fake stupidity or simulate deafness. If he found that a guy was too dumb to fake being deaf, Weyman simply punctured his eardrum. It was a lucrative business, until an FBI agent posing as a dodger got in the way. Weyman
was arrested and sent to prison. After his release in 1948, the great imposter redeemed himself in 1960 when he tried to stop two armed thieves from robbing the motel where he worked. Weyman was shot and killed. Ironically enough, he died a hero just being himself.
6
CHINcanery
The two Mafia bosses could not have appeared more unalike. John Gotti, the “Dapper Don” of the Gambino organization, strutted around town in expensive suits and flashy jewelry with perfectly coiffed hair, while Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, the so-called “Oddfather” of the Genovese crime family, was often seen shuffling around Greenwich Village in his bathrobe, unkempt and babbling in apparent dementia. Yet though Gigante seemed like a harmless flake to the rest of the world, Gotti was terrified of him. He knew the Chin only feigned madness to fool the authorities; that beneath the dirty bathrobe was a ruthless killer who had already ordered one hit on him, and who could strike again at any time.4
Gigante’s insanity charade served him well for three decades before it finally ended in 2003 when he admitted his ruse as part of a plea agreement with the U.S. government. It started around 1970. The Chin was still a Genovese capo then and faced bribery charges in New Jersey. Psychiatrists told the court that he was delusional, a paranoid schizophrenic whose condition was rapidly deteriorating. The charges were eventually dropped, but not the crazy act. Gigante had discovered a great way to keep the law away. He periodically checked into a psychiatric hospital, and also performed little acts of lunacy to enhance the image. One time, for example, FBI agents burst into his apartment and found him in the shower, under an umbrella. “Vincent is a paranoid schizophrenic,” his brother, a Roman Catholic priest, told reporters. “He hallucinates. He’s been that way since 1968 or 1969.”
A Treasury of Deception Page 2