Last year, ABAA dealer Patterson Smith of Montclair, NJ, who specializes in rare books on the law, crime & criminal justice, history and gambling, sold a collection of 2,200 books, manuscripts and pamphlets about financial sharpies, charlatans, and their schemes to defraud to John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
As the New York Times reported, “The works — including titles like Frauds Exposed by Anthony Comstock, an 1880s anti-vice crusader; ‘Yellow Kid’ Weil, the biography of a legendary Chicago swindler; Famous Imposters by Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula; and The Rise of Mr. Ponzi, the swindler’s curious self-published, and self-serving, 1935 autobiography — were purchased for $22,000.”
The Devil and the Grafter by Clifton R WooldridgeBoston : J.H. Earle, 1907.
Now catalogued in its entirety, within the collection was an unpublished manuscript by William H. McMasters, a memoir of his experiences working as a publicist for Charles Ponzi, the fraudster extraordinaire whose claim to Most Notorious Con Artist in History was recently ceded to Bernard L. Madoff in a no-contest episode of Our Gifted Grifters, a too-much-reality TV show pilot not picked up by the networks due to the recent glut of such characters; they threatened to outnumber the viewing audience.
Not too long after beginning to work for the financial phony, McMasters understood that all was not right on Fantasy Dividends Island and, consumed by civic duty, blew the whistle on Ponzi with a dramatic front page story in the August 2, 1920 Boston Post emblazoned by a headline screaming, “Declares Ponzi Is Now Hopelessly Insolvent,” that sealed Ponzi’s fate.
McMasters’ manuscript, The Ponzi Story, was typed on 206 double-spaced pages and completed around 1962, six years before Mr. McMasters died at 94.
The collection had been amassed by a William D. Gall of Waukegan, Ill., who found the McMasters work in the Old Book Store in Fairlee, VT, in 1990.
This last fact is significant to me because, during the summer of 1962, I was an eleven year old inmate at Camp Norway on the shores of Lake Fairlee in Ely, a village within Fairlee, and desperate for – in lieu of a conjugal visit by my eleven year old GF that would have never happened in a million years – something, anything, other than archery, mosquitoes, and a bugle blowing reveille at dawn. Had I known that there was a book shop in town, I’d have tunneled out of Camp Norway like a mole on methadrine.
My folks sent me to summer camp to get me away from books and isolation and into the world of sunshine, social interaction, sports, and Swiss Army knife skills so I would grow up to be a red blooded All-American. That plan doomed to failure, they gladly – with a little too much glee, I suspect – took the two months off-duty.
How can parents be so horribly, criminally cruel? I threw the metaphysical book at them but they were tried by a jury of their peers and “not guilty” was a foregone conclusion – unlike that for Bernard L. Madoff who, had he actually gone to trial rather than plead guilty, would have been lynched by a jury of his peers, or, rather, because he has no peers at this activity, by a bloodthirsty mob.
Ponzi, on the other hand, plead guilty to one count of mail fraud on a Federal rap, served three and a half years, was released from prison, then faced twenty-two counts of larceny by the State of Massachusetts. In the first state trial, he acted as his own lawyer and swindled the jury, who found him not guilty. Tried again, the jury was hung. Third time the charm. Ponzi, however, was not hung. He served five years and was deported back to Italy; he had never become a U.S. citizen.
Con men, frauds, swindlers, and their techniques are fascinating subjects for book collection. One of my all-time favorite books in this area is THE DESTRUCTION OF MEPHISTO’S GREATEST WEB, Or All Grafts Laid Bare, Being a Complete Exposure of All Gambling, Graft and Confidence Games, with Stories Illustrating the Methods Employed by the Different “Operators” by H.K. James (Salt Lake City: The Raleigh Publishing Company, 1914). It’s in a great pictorial cloth binding and sports a wild fold-out plate illustrating the road to ruin.
It’s an old story. It begins at summer camp…