by Amy Reading
Before Joseph Furey could unfurl the perfect con on Norfleet in 1919, there remained one more scene in the swindling script to invent and perfect. The final filigree in the big con was the uncontested invention of William Elmer Mead, the man J. Edgar Hoover called “one of the shrewdest of confidence men.” Mead abstained from alcohol, cigarettes, and swearing, and even attended church from time to time, earning him the moniker the Christian Kid. Mead was the Yellow Kid’s exact contemporary, and his career almost precisely mirrored Weil’s: a scrappy start in short cons, higher education in fixed footraces, and then staggering success with the big con in the first two decades of the twentieth century. His prized gambit, which worked so well it hit the swindling fraternity like a virus, was the wallet drop. Joseph Furey learned it directly from Mead when they worked together in Midwestern towns, and he used it on Norfleet when he planted the leather wallet in the armchair of the Adolphus Hotel. According to Hoover, this technique earned Mead millions over the years. He kept losing his wallet well into the 1930s and might have perpetuated the con forever had he not stumbled into the pathway of another crime. He effortlessly conned a Missouri contractor of a sum reported to be as high as $200,000, but not long afterward he opened up a newspaper and read about a kidnapping: the friend from whom the contractor had borrowed money to give to Mead had been kidnapped. Mead panicked, thinking that the federal investigation of the kidnapping would inevitably lead to him. He contacted a plastic surgeon, the same one who would later operate on John Dillinger’s face, and had his fingertips mutilated, then skipped out on the $2,000 bill and dashed across the country to elude the secret agents he thought were pursuing him. In fact, the FBI never connected him to the kidnapping and were not in pursuit—until, that is, they learned of his surgery, which was itself in violation of federal law. “The trick by which he had sought to escape the government was the very thing that brought him into its custody,” Hoover noted with satisfaction. “Mead had arrested himself.” The FBI turned him over to the postal inspectors, who jailed him for a fourteen-year-old charge of defrauding through the mails, thus ending his career.
Not all con artists ended their lives in jail, unemployed, or destitute—only most of them. Joseph Weil was perhaps the most famous exception. He lived to be a hundred years old, and only about a tenth of his lifetime was spent in prisons. Naturally, he used his enforced downtime to great profit by picking the brains of other arch criminals and inventing new schemes. After spending six years in Leavenworth in the late 1920s, he departed for Italy, where he swindled Mussolini out of $2 million in cash by selling Il Duce mining lands in Colorado. In the mid-1930s, the Yellow Kid went into retirement. In 1948, he published his memoir, and in 1956, at the age of eighty-one, he publicly forswore con artistry in an interview with Saul Bellow. Later that year, he testified before Senator Estes Kefauver’s subcommittee on juvenile delinquency, huffing in outrage at contemporary swindlers who used young children to con their elders and protesting that “it was never like that in my time.” He appeared contrite for his past, telling the subcommittee, “I see how despicable were the things I did. I found out a man is responsible not only for himself but for other lives he wrecked.” The historian Jay Robert Nash befriended him at the end of his life. One time Nash came upon him on a street corner in Chicago’s North Side. He was not his usual natty self but unkempt, unshaven, and dressed in rags. Nash immediately offered to help him with a loan to get him back on his feet, but Weil declined and turned away. Nash persisted, until finally the Yellow Kid swiveled around and hissed, “Go away, dammit, can’t you see I’m working!” Yet even the indefatigable Yellow Kid, who it is rumored earned over $8 million in his lifetime, was buried in a pauper’s grave.
Most swindlers in the big con school of artistry never got a chance to relish their five- and six-figure windfalls. As one sharper explained, “Crooked money disappears like lightning. A beer pocketbook and a champagne appetite encourage further depredations.” If the law couldn’t always catch them, coincidence, ill fortune, drugs, gambling, or their supposed comrades would eventually steal away their profits. Which one of these would be Joseph Furey’s downfall?
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Con Never Dies
Following Furey’s Christmastime wire to his wife, Norfleet made a second trip to Florida. This time he brought along additional weaponry—his son Pete, then twenty years old. On his way east from California, he dropped in at the ranch just in time to surprise his family as they were sitting down to Christmas dinner, raising a hullabaloo of joy. But Norfleet couldn’t help notice that his wife was endeavoring to keep him away from the barn, and soon he’d extracted a tearful confession from her. The last time he’d wired home for money, she’d been so desperate she’d had to sell Hornet, his beloved cow horse, a steed easily worth $350 who’d gone to a neighbor for a mere $75. That did it. With more personal motivation than he’d ever had before, Norfleet gathered up his son, bought a new hat, shaved off his mustache, and headed for Jacksonville. Within forty-five minutes of his arrival, he had Joseph Furey in his sights.
Norfleet and his son had made a list of the city’s leading hotels and had come up with eight in total. They split them up and canvassed each of them. When they reconnoitered, Pete told his father that he was sure he’d spotted Furey, whom he recognized from mug shots, in the lobby of the Mason Hotel. They headed back to the Mason and staked it out from opposite street corners, and soon Norfleet did indeed spot his quarry. They trailed him to the Hilton Café, and, secure in his disguise, Norfleet entered with the intention of taking a seat near Furey simply to keep an eye on him. But the headwaiter guided Norfleet to a seat at Furey’s own table, and the swindler looked up at Norfleet, looked again, and recognized him. The two men stared fixedly at each other.
In the next instant, Furey rose from his chair, but Norfleet quickly covered him with his gun, yelling, “You can’t do it, Furey! You’re my prisoner!”
Furey turned away from Norfleet and shouted to the other diners, “Don’t let him rob me, men! Don’t let him rob me! He’ll take my diamonds—Don’t let him do it! For God’s sake, men, don’t let him!” Furey’s words electrified the other diners, and the café erupted as they crammed jewelry and wallets into their pockets and fell over one another in their quests for the exit. Norfleet saw Furey’s expression change to relief just a fraction of a second before he felt his right arm being wrenched behind his back, his revolver pinned to his own side. Furey lunged past him, but Norfleet managed to grab his lapel in his left hand. Furey bent down and bit like an animal, drawing blood, but still Norfleet held on. “I could have dragged him to Texas,” he wrote. “Nothing could separate my grip on him unless someone cut my hand off.” With the other man’s arm around his neck—Norfleet was incredulous when he managed to glimpse that it was Steel, the insideman from the Daytona clubhouse—the three men were deadlocked.
Then Pete charged through the front door, separating the crowd with a waving pistol in each hand, one of which he jammed into Furey’s side. Allured by the commotion, several police officers made their way into the café but froze when they caught sight of Pete, with another gun trained on them as they came through the open door. To the officers, it looked as if Norfleet were a burglar and Pete his assistant, and they came charging at the knotted men with their clubs raised high. Norfleet and Pete began shouting that they were fellow officers with a warrant for the man in their custody, and soon the scene quieted down enough for them to be heard. The officers took possession of Furey, and they all agreed to sort out the matter at the station.
Once there, Furey regained complete mastery. While one of the officers reported on what had taken place at the café, Furey and the sergeant exchanged glances. Then the sergeant turned to Pete and said sternly, “What right had you to have your gun in this man’s side?” Pete calmly produced the Tarrant County warrant for Joseph Furey’s arrest. “How do you know this is the man?” the sergeant continued, undaunted. Pete handed over Furey’s rogues�
� gallery photograph. “Do you call that a picture of this man?” the sergeant sneered.
Furey stood up and said commandingly, “My name is Edward Leonard. I never saw either of these men before in my life. I am here on some very important business. Name my bond, officer, so that I may attend to my business without further annoyance.” And the officer promptly began filling out the bond form, while Furey stood there and smoothed down his suit, pinching his trouser creases back into place. Norfleet and Pete began to splutter, but Furey interrupted them, saying loudly, “He is writing out my recognizance bond for one thousand dollars.” The sergeant obediently filled in the amount.
Norfleet reached into his wallet and produced his requisition warrant for Furey, signed by the governor of Florida. He shoved it at the sergeant, who put down his pen and read it over. There was the tiniest of pauses. Then he sighed, handed the warrant back to Norfleet, and said to the prisoner, “Mr. Furey, I cannot do a thing for you.” Norfleet could not stifle his barking laugh. The sergeant had just addressed him as Furey rather than Leonard, and the scene had just fallen irrevocably apart. Norfleet had finally pierced the fix.
With that, Norfleet and Pete took charge of their prisoner and began the journey back to Fort Worth. The head deputy lent them a service car and driver, and suggested that when they got to the Dinsmore Flag Station outside of Jacksonville, they park within a forest just outside the station, to prevent Furey from initiating habeas corpus proceedings or any other stalling techniques. The very instant they crossed the town line, Furey began to plead with Norfleet for his freedom. Norfleet cut him off mid-sentence. “I know all about the suffering humanity, and the rash acts, and I’m not going to take a brainstorm, so you may just as well save your breath. You’re going back to Texas!” And the chauffeur pulled the car in to a secluded spot about three hundred yards away from the railroad track.
As Norfleet got Furey out of the car and led him to a tree stump, Furey tried again. “Can’t we get down to business?” he said to the cowboy, and offered him $20,000. Norfleet paused. Furey hastily resumed explaining exactly how he could get Norfleet the money. He could hand over the deed to his San Francisco apartment house, or his half interest in a four-hundred-acre ranch in San Luis Obispo. Or he could write a check payable to Pete for the full amount, and Norfleet could send his son back into Jacksonville to cash it that very evening.
And Norfleet accepted Furey’s offer.
His autobiography does not offer a single word of explanation for this decision, an act which seemed to undo everything that had preceded it. Was Norfleet’s quest, which had dominated a year of his life, really only about money in the end? Would stealing back half of his lost fortune at the point of a gun truly quell the moral fire that had burned in his gut and propelled him across the country all those months? Perhaps there was no moral fire in his gut after all. Or perhaps this exchange between the two men was a further demonstration of Furey’s supreme artistry, the way he could read a mark, excite his greed, and almost uncannily discern his price. Perhaps Furey had seen what Norfleet could not quite admit to himself, that Norfleet’s quest had begun to affect his very identity. He was no longer a Texas cowboy with his feet planted firmly on the prairie. Maybe, by leaving his ranch and putting on a disguise, he had uprooted his principles and allowed them to become a little less absolute. He had not only adopted the methods of the swindlers; he had also taken on their modern, restless worldview, an identity that was at home anywhere because it seamlessly adjusted itself to the needs of the moment. But of course none of this earns a comment from Norfleet in his autobiography. He simply expects his readers to relate to his opportunistic strategy to regain some of the money he lost in the swindle. Economic self-interest requires no explanation.
As if to compensate for his fall from the moral high ground, Norfleet sealed their deal with a stern little lecture: “I’m going to let you write out that order for the twenty thousand and I’m going to let Pete take it and present it for payment. But I want this to sink into you and sink deep. If you get Pete into any of your traps; if anything happens to him, or if he isn’t back here by the time this sun goes down, your light goes out. Is that understood?” Furey agreed, and Norfleet sent his son and the chauffeur back into the dangerous maws of Furey’s organization.
It wasn’t long before the two men, alike in their garrulity and psychological curiosity, fell to talking. But for the pistol in one man’s hand and the handcuffs on the other’s, they seemed for all the world like two friends catching up on each other’s lives. Furey companionably wished that he’d killed Norfleet the last time he was in Florida as he’d planned. “I have spent seventeen thousand dollars keeping out of your way,” noted Furey. “If ever there was a nemesis, you have been mine. I have lost through your damnable hounding as much money as I have made.” Norfleet knew that dollar estimate was low, and with pure pleasure he told Furey that the money he’d spent to slip free from Lips and Anderson had been wasted because Norfleet had caught them in their inattention. At this news, Furey railed and shouted at the palm leaves around them, and then poured out the entire story of Lips and Anderson’s ambush in his Glendale home: his attempt to scale the eight-foot-tall fence, the fall that plummeted him back into his own garden, the bullets that thudded around him as Lips and Anderson caught up. Gradually, his anger spent itself, and his tirade wound down. And then he looked over Norfleet’s shoulder.
Norfleet sprang to his feet and spun around in one motion, putting Furey between him and the trees behind him, his gun to Furey’s head. “Go back, men! Go back! For God’s sake, go back!” Furey pleaded to his unseen protectors. No one answered. No one moved. So Norfleet gave it a try: “If you over there behind those palmleaf fans don’t show up, and pretty quick, I’m going to do some bombarding into your hiding place that’ll make you either stand or lie down forever.” Silently, four men emerged from the forest cover, four shotguns in their hands, staring at their boss. Furey again ordered them to leave, but the most he could accomplish was to get them to retreat to the main road some hundred feet away.
Norfleet pointed to the long shadows crossing the clearing and said threateningly to Furey, “Pete could have been to Jacksonville and back again by this time.” Panic infecting his voice, Furey assured him that Pete would be there soon, and before he’d finished speaking, they could hear an approaching car. But they could also hear that the car was not slowing. It careened past them, swerved around alarmingly, and charged back into the clearing. Norfleet could see that Pete was not in the car. Three men got out, each holding a riot gun, and they joined the four men at the edge of the clearing. By now, the sun was low, enormous, and as red as the bloodshed that Norfleet had promised. “Furey, if you have anything to get off your conscience you’d better begin to unload!” he roared.
“Listen! Listen!” Furey moaned. Sure enough, there was the sound of another approaching car, but rather than feel relief, Norfleet felt his heart cramp in fear: his son was about to drive into seven gun muzzles. In Norfleet’s autobiography, when he describes this moment, all the campy bravado drops away, and his words reach for a kind of austere, desperate grace. He secured his grip on the gun at Furey’s head and readied his muscles for the battle to come. “The least mistake and God knows what the result. It seems as if all that lived in me left my body. I was suspended between action and inertia.” He does not say that he regretted what he’d asked his son to do, nor does he condemn himself for the greed that brought them to this moment, but he does write that as he waited for the car to arrive, he could clearly see in his mind the whole saga, “a long story visioned in the space of a human heart.”
Pete’s borrowed Cadillac sped into view, but when the chauffeur saw the guns sticking out into the road, he floored the accelerator and the car whooshed past them. Norfleet could see his son in the back and hear him shouting to the driver to turn back, and then he saw Pete lean over and shove “his little persuader” at the driver’s head and order him to slow and turn (here,
Norfleet’s poetic words vanish as he records the black chauffeur’s terrified response in offensive pidgin English). Furey continued to implore his men not to start anything; for once, Furey’s and Norfleet’s interests were perfectly aligned. Pete and the driver returned, and keeping his gun on Furey the entire time, Norfleet maneuvered him into the backseat, keeping the con man on the side facing the gunmen to shield Pete. The driver once again stomped his foot on the pedal, and they barreled to the station to flag down the train to Georgia.
They could hear the train approaching, so Norfleet jumped out of the car and ran to the tracks, waving his arms. A family sat in a buggy waiting for the train to pass, and they watched Norfleet’s exertions with a certain bemusement, until finally the man informed Norfleet that the train was a limited and never stopped at this station. Even within his well-earned cynicism, Norfleet still possessed the capacity for outrage. The head deputy had double-crossed him in the only way that the governor’s requisition had allowed. Pete and Norfleet decided there was nothing else to do but return to Jacksonville—if they could make it back through the seven-gun salute.
They drove until they could see two cars ahead of them, four guns in one and three in the other. The cars were parallel to each other, with a space the size of a Cadillac between them. Norfleet’s driver maneuvered right in between them, and for a second Norfleet and his son were flanked by the gunmen. Norfleet ordered the chauffeur to drive as fast as the car would allow and glanced down at the speedometer. “It registered seventy-eight miles an hour! It didn’t seem possible.” The Cadillac pulled ahead, but as it did, Furey lifted his hulking mass out of his seat and reached an arm around to the steering wheel. Norfleet turned around and slammed the butt of his gun into Furey’s head, knocking the huge man unconscious, but he fell onto the driver’s shoulders. The car swerved without slowing, grinding dirt and pine saplings under its wheels, until Furey’s body slid back into its seat, the driver righted the car, and they continued on their uneventful way to Jacksonville.