The Mark Inside

by Amy Reading

  Ultimately, none of these procedural tactics made any difference. Within eleven days of each other, Ward and Gerber were both found guilty and sentenced to the maximum penalty of ten years in the Texas state penitentiary at Huntsville, putting Norfleet’s tally at three out of five swindlers behind bars. When Ward heard his sentence, he murmured, “Ten years—the limit,” but he smiled at the jurors as they left the jury box. Ward’s and Gerber’s cases were appealed and Ward was released on a $25,000 bond, but he was almost immediately rearrested and extradited to Washington, D.C., presumably for swindling Peter Nee. The day he was to stand trial in November, he was found in his solitary cell with his head battered, cut, and bruised. He was taken to the hospital, treated, and returned to his cell. Not long thereafter, groans were heard, and when the guards rushed in, they discovered Ward dying for real this time, having done the job right with a surgical knife he’d stolen from the hospital. Ward was the first but not the last casualty in Norfleet’s manhunt.

  But if we bend toward the vitrine and peer closer at this strange beast of a story, even the tentative, provisional certainty we’ve just arrived at begins to falter. The bare outline of Norfleet’s story checks out, because its details reside in the records of district courthouses, but so much of his story—all of the most interesting parts, in fact—lies outside the historical record. There was no stenographer in the Norfleets’ kitchen that winter day just before Christmas in 1919 to transcribe the conversation in which Frank and Eliza hit upon California for his next destination. The Associated Press article about Norfleet’s swindling, the one that ran in papers all over the country, the one that Cathey saw in San Francisco in time to break the con men’s spell, has not yet surfaced. Norfleet said that the article ended with his direct appeal to readers for clues leading to his criminals’ capture. “Letters from every part of the country poured in for three years,” he claimed. Perhaps he was telling the truth, and the newspaper article still lies hidden in an archive of a local library somewhere in this huge country. Or perhaps there was no newspaper article. There might not even have been that conversation at the kitchen table. The Plainview Evening Herald reported that Mrs. J. F. Norfleet joined her husband in Dallas on December 5, and the two of them didn’t return to their ranch until December 23, the day that Ward and Gerber’s extradition papers were issued.

  The Fejee Mermaid was definitively a fraud, with just enough verisimilitude sprinkled on top to make it perplexing. Norfleet’s story is unquestionably true, with just enough embellishment sprinkled on top to make it spicy. Of course, Norfleet had plenty of incentives to embellish his tale besides the cowboy’s natural tendency toward spice, and the story of the newspaper article is a convenient one. Perhaps, in 1919, he was not quite so willing to publicize his own gullibility as he was in 1924, when he wrote his autobiography, and the newspaper article exists, but under an assumed name. Or maybe he had virtually nothing to do with the capture of Ward and Gerber, and he inserted a newspaper article into the story to make himself more central to the adventure. Or just maybe he was absolutely crucial to Ward and Gerber’s arrest, but his methods were underhanded or illegal enough to jeopardize their eventual conviction. The deeper we travel to the heart of this story of deception, the more entwined become the hero and his villains. These doubts about Norfleet’s sleuthing methods arise at exactly the point in his chronicle when he begins to assume the tactics of a master swindler. To get the rest of his con men, Norfleet would become an impostor.

  Perhaps, just perhaps, we can profit more from Norfleet’s story by allowing ourselves to be his marks than by letting our skepticism ruin the adventure. After all, a willingness to be humbugged characterizes the finest minds. As Barnum himself said, “The greatest humbug of all is the man who believes—or pretends to believe—that everything and everybody are humbugs.” The Prince of Humbugs wants nothing to do with such a killjoy. “He thinks himself philosophic and practical, a man of the world; he thinks to show knowledge and wisdom, penetration, deep acquaintance with men and things. Poor fellow! he has exposed his own nakedness. Instead of showing that others are rotten inside, he has proved that he is.” In fact, humbug points to more than an individual virtue; it underscores a value crucial to the functioning of American civic culture. As The Literary World opined on the occasion of the Confidence Man’s debut in 1849, “It is a good thing, and speaks well for human nature, that, at this late day, in spite of all the hardening of civilization, and all the warning of newspapers, men can be swindled,” because it proves that men still retain the capacity for trust. So, to preserve the very foundation of American society, let us agree to believe J. Frank Norfleet and his extraordinary adventures. Even if the ensuing chapters make that more difficult still.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Double-Crossings

  Norfleet left Fort Worth after Ward’s and Gerber’s trials, and with Mrs. Ward’s tip as his only lead he headed to Florida. His first stop was Tallahassee, where he managed to gain an audience with the governor and obtain a requisition warrant that would allow him to take his men out of the state without interference from local officials. Then, since he had absolutely nothing to go on, Norfleet canvassed Jacksonville, St. Augustine, Tampa, and St. Petersburg. In each town he visited the sheriff and the chief of police and combed through the photographs in their rogues’ galleries. He spent hours at a time hanging out on boardwalks and piers, watching the crowds and hoping to spot a familiar face.

  In St. Petersburg, he met an elderly couple, the Bockermans, who’d just been swindled out of $10,000 in a real estate deal, and he took a diverting couple of days out of his own manhunt to track down their three swindlers. Twice he located them; twice he approached a police officer and pointed out the men; twice he watched as the police officer thanked him for his service and then sauntered off to “an important engagement.” He grew doubly frustrated, at the corruption that didn’t even bother to disguise itself and at the loss of time from his own quest. “There seemed to be just two of us, myself and my gun,” he concluded. This was an unforgivably disingenuous statement. There were actually five of him, because Norfleet had four guns on his person.

  He had read in the newspaper a few days earlier that three swindlers had been apprehended in Tampa. By now his search carried him along on its own logic, and so, “one lead being as good as another, I left for Tampa.” The train ride gave him time to reflect: clearly, his method of capturing swindlers by emulating a police officer was flawed. He would have to sneak up on the police just as he was trying to sneak up on Furey; he would have to ease information out of people and nudge them into doing what he wanted, and for that he needed to steal a trick not from a detective but from his very prey.

  He unfolded the newspaper with the article about the three swindlers, and with hands more accustomed to lassoing and branding than needlework, he carefully cut it out and pasted it inside the first page of the current day’s paper. He was making a blute, a fake newspaper clipping designed to elicit both information and trust. The insideman in the big con would often pull a blute out of his wallet and reluctantly show it to his mark. Its photograph would be blurry, or even torn in half, the paper would be creased and worn, and the article itself would be vague, but the mark would rush to fill in the perceptual blanks and see what the swindler wanted him to see. The blute would testify to the insideman’s notoriety in the world of finance, and the mark would soon regard the swindler the same way the newspaper did: as dangerously successful. It was a way to invert the relationship between con man and victim, making the mark eager to be included in the swindler’s trusted inner circle and allowing the swindler to adopt the position of skepticism, requiring the mark to earn his confidence. Furey hadn’t used a blute on Norfleet, but somehow he’d learned the ploy. Norfleet took to calling it “my Extra” and would use it as a conversation starter whenever he arrived in a new town.

  As soon as Norfleet disembarked at Tampa with the newspaper under his arm, he looked around for a venerable off
icer of the law. He “grinned a grin as wide as the prairie,” adopted his most exaggerated redneck accent, and approached the officer, unfolding the paper to his article and asking if the man could please explain the words “bunco” and “con.” The cop looked at him with incredulity and asked if he really didn’t know what those words meant. “No, I don’t,” declared Norfleet. “I thought mebbe as how you’d learn me?” So the cop, warming to his subject, began to enumerate the various categories of swindles and scams. He was soon joined by two other officers, to whom Norfleet turned and earnestly exclaimed, “I never heered the like of it. Gol dern their hides, if they ain’t got more nerve’n a pack of coyotes! I never heered none of ’em howl!” The officers laughed indulgently and then began talking among themselves. “Say, fellows,” said one of them, “I just got a tip, personally, that one of the links in the big con-chain has opened headquarters in the Montezuma Hotel, in Sanford.” Norfleet bowed away, then slipped onto the next train to Sanford.

  When he appeared on the columned porch of the Montezuma Hotel, he was painted in local color. He’d seen from the train the vast fields of celery that grew stoutly in that part of central Florida, lending Sanford its nickname of Celery City, so at the first possible opportunity he’d tramped around a muddy celery field, ruining his leather shoes and staining his pant cuffs up to the shins. Now, in the lobby of the Montezuma, he moved slowly to allow himself to be seen. He checked in under the name of Parkinson, then surveyed the long room and picked a chair in front of the fireplace with a good view of the staircase. He proceeded to peel the mud off his shoes and trousers, shaking his head in rue while keeping an eye on the men who walked through the room. At length, an elderly couple could not resist asking if he’d taken a fall into the mud. Why, no, he had not, he answered loudly. He was a stockman from Blackwell, Oklahoma, he boomed, but he’d heard about the crisp investment potential in celery fields, so he’d come over to Sanford to take a look, and he thought he might well make a purchase.

  The lure he’d thrown into the waters of the lobby netted him a fish the first thing next morning. On his way to breakfast he thought he saw a dapper young man with sleek blond hair approaching him. Norfleet readied his face in a pleasant smile, and sure enough the blond man sidled up and began making small talk. Eventually, he came to the point. “I believe I heard you mention a celery farm. I happened to be passing through the lobby last evening and I thought I understood you to say you intended purchasing one.” He extended a manicured hand. “My name is Johnson.”

  Norfleet had his lines ready. “I went out to look at one last night and got mud up to my ears, almost. It’s dirty work, this personal inspection, but a man cannot afford to sink forty or fifty thousand dollars into the mud, unless he’s sure it’s rich mud, can he?” And Norfleet smiled equably, giving time for the figure to enter Johnson’s head and find its place in the equation he was drawing up in his mind. When the number clicked, Johnson smoothly moved to the next line, telling Norfleet that he was in luck, because Johnson just happened to know quite a bit about celery farming—“Can’t we find a comfortable seat?”—and he’d be happy to advise him on his future purchase. Johnson proceeded to disparage the land and industry of Sanford, stressing the difficulty of growing celery and the risk of the investment, but then he began to talk up the land around Daytona Beach. Why, he was going up to Daytona that very afternoon, and if Parkinson would care to join him, he’d be happy to give him an agricultural tour. It seemed to Norfleet that he was awfully eager to move the action to Daytona, so he protested a little for form’s sake but soon acceded to a plan that included checking out of the Montezuma and taking the train up to the beach. Norfleet packed two of his guns in his luggage and two in his suit.

  The men fell into a rhythm of conversation with just a hint of an adversarial tone to it. “I was determined that he shouldn’t get the better of me with his politeness,” said Norfleet. Underneath the courtly pantomime of their conversation, Norfleet admired Johnson’s professionalism. “It always amused me to note how well these crooks played their roles. No character actors surpass them. Johnson began to fit into the groove. He had a certain patronizing manner which they all have.” Norfleet’s nature as a practical joker simply could not resist the opportunity to upset the script in nettlesome little ways, all the while allowing its grand arc to carry him to what he hoped were the winter quarters of Joseph Furey.

  So when Johnson jumped up from his seat on the train and stared out the window in total astonishment, exclaiming that he’d just seen someone he knew motoring by, Norfleet said, “I saw him, but he looked about the same as many other men. Was he peculiarly marked?” Johnson was unperturbed. That man, he explained, was Steel, the infamous trader who’d taken $125,000 out of the stock exchange in just one day. And that evening when they arrived in Daytona Beach, Norfleet lagged behind Johnson as they walked down the main street, and he popped into a small guesthouse to book his own room for the night, upsetting the roper’s plan of rooming together. But Johnson did not disappoint; he only appeared to let Norfleet off the leash, when in fact Norfleet witnessed him spending the night on a bench in front of Norfleet’s room. Johnson knocked at his door promptly at 8:00 a.m. to begin the next stage of the con.

  Johnson proposed that they take a walk on the beach, and knowing exactly whom they’d encounter, Norfleet assented. Sure enough, they soon spotted a man walking toward them in apparent oblivion to the beauty of his surroundings, his face buried in a yellow sheaf of telegrams. He did not raise his head even as his shoulder brushed Norfleet’s, so engrossed was the important man in his important work. Only when he had settled down on a large piece of driftwood did Johnson bend down to whisper excitedly to Norfleet that the man who’d just passed was the same man he’d spotted from the train, the stock trader whom he’d had the good fortune to meet once. “I think I’ll speak to him and see if he remembers me,” he concluded. “By all means, do!” Norfleet urged.

  They approached; Steel feigned offense at the imposition; Johnson persisted, and Steel melted into courtesy when he remembered Johnson. As he explained away his initial hostility, Steel’s words, or at least Norfleet’s version of Steel’s words, resonated with unintentional double meaning: “They are so damned clever you know about getting things out of you that you don’t suspect you are giving away, that I have to be very cautious with whom I talk. We manipulators, you understand, must protect the secrets of our business. Publicity has ruined many a good man!” The play continued: Johnson asked Steel to submit a $20 bid for him and Steel good-naturedly agreed, striding the few blocks into town to the local exchange and returning within the half hour. The $20 magically bloomed into $40, and then $80. Steel finally invited the men to join him at a private exchange. He explained that some of the members had rented a clubhouse high on the cliffs above the beach where they were betting on horses, and his chauffeur would be happy to drive them up. On cue, Norfleet agreed.

  But on the way up to the clubhouse, Norfleet’s self-confidence began to ebb. The drive was taking much longer than he’d anticipated, and he was acutely conscious of how far behind lay the safety of town. Every bump in the road heightened the paranoid feeling that he was heading into a trap. He wrenched his mind away from such thoughts and told himself to use what he had. At the next bump in the road, he flung himself against his companions and under the cover of clumsily extricating himself from the tangle of bodies, he felt their hips: no guns. He felt marginally reassured, until they arrived at their destination a half hour later. The club turned out to be a sprawling mansion wedged into the side of a cliff above the sea. It had quite a view, but Norfleet’s nerves happened to be a little edgy, and the jagged rocks that broke up the surf below looked not only like a threat but like a foreshadowing of his fate. Steel curtly ordered the chauffeur back to town.

  But it was what lay inside the clubhouse that tautened Norfleet’s quivering nerves. Across from the front door was a table. Upon the table was a heap of money. And on either
side of the money was a man standing guard, each one holding a carbine rifle and wearing a six-shooter. The sight confirmed what Norfleet had begun to suspect, that this go-round of the big con was not going to play out like his experiences in Dallas and Fort Worth. He’d come to expect that the threat of violence undergirding the swindle would, like the profit that was its denouement, be kept offstage until the very last instant. But Steel’s exchange was playing by a different rule book, and Norfleet would need to learn it on the fly. Steel and Johnson headed out of the room to enact some private business, telling Norfleet the exchange was not yet open and inviting him to see what he could see while he waited.

  He looked around the rest of the room. To the left of the money was a sweaty young man with rolled-up shirtsleeves who was frantically chalking and erasing stock quotes on a blackboard. In the center of the room sat the telegraph operator with the customary green eyeshade. And across from the blackboard sat two businessmen with their eyes riveted on the stock quotations. He recognized none of the faces. The room was silent but for the clicking of the telegraph machine and the booming of the waves below the picture windows.

  He headed toward the pile of money, and since no one moved to impede him, he touched some of the bills in their banded packages, astonished to find that they were genuine. For the slimmest of moments, Norfleet allowed his self-righteousness to shade into self-pity: here were hundreds of thousands of dollars begotten in the same manner as his lost savings, a heaping, spilling mountain of money that represented uncountable hours of hard work stolen away. But then he continued his nonchalant survey. He noted that aside from the room which Steel and Johnson occupied, the rest of the story seemed unused, the rooms empty or even boarded up.