Capital Cons
Throughout its checkered history, the nation’s capital has held special allure for the most sophisticated species of the American criminal class: the con artist. Nowhere else, save perhaps for Wall Street, has the confidence game been more comfortably practiced and its practitioners more handsomely rewarded.
Disciples of Phineas Barnum, knights of the golden fleece, con artists have swindled their way through society soirées on Embassy Row and wheedled their way into the White House; no corner of the city in fact, has been off limits to their ingenuity. With its generous assortment of wheelers and dealers, palm-greasers, status-seekers, and miscellaneous bigwigs, the nation’s capital has unwittingly welcomed — yea, beckoned — those at the pinnacle of the profession.
A number of years ago, no less an authority than the dean of the District of Columbia’s bunco squad observed that Washington was “a con man’s paradise.” A between-the-lines reading of this expert assessment suggests that Washington not only is the seat of government, but the seat of suckerdom.
Long has it been so. As far back as 1869 — the same year Alexander “Boss” Shepherd was preparing to drain the District’s treasury of more than $20 million — Washington’s weakness for confidence games and their perpetrators was formally recognized by Dr. John B. Ellis. In his book, The Sights and Secrets of the National Capital, the good doctor wrote:
“Persons visiting Washington on business are very frequently the dupes of impostors with which the city abounds. These scoundrels represent themselves as Members of Congress, or as belonging to one of the important branches of Government, and offer their services to facilitate your business in any way that lies in their power.”
Dr. Ellis dutifully concluded: “A man who is fleeced by bogus congressmen and other impostors has only his own stupidity to blame.” The annals of crime in the nation’s capital have preserved the artistic exploits of some of the smoothest operators of them all, and these are their stories — the pros, in other words, and their cons.
GASTON MEANS
The Flimflam Man
As he read The Washington Post on the morning of March 2, 1932, Gaston Means saw more than horror in the kidnapping of twenty-month-old Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr. He saw the potential for profit. “I’ll bet I could solve this case,” he muttered over coffee at the breakfast table, “if only I could get in on it.”
For the next two days, Means nervously paced the floors of his family’s twelve-room house in Chevy Chase. A brilliant, though decidedly warped, mind was at work. Means had been thoroughly discredited as a detective, but that did not stop him from scheming for a way to play a role in what would become the most notorious crime of the 20th century. In the annals of Washington criminal history, Gaston Bullock Means is the undisputed king of con. In the 1910s, he befriended a millionaire heiress, bilked her of more than $150,000, and later was acquitted of her murder. During World War I, Means simultaneously “spied” for the British, the Germans, and the U.S. Army Intelligence Service — though the extent of his investigative work was writing ominously worded dispatches drawn from newspaper clippings. He came to Washington in October 1921 with the onset of the Harding administration, and soon figured out how to shake down boodeggers.
“You see,” Means would tell them, “I’m a great friend of the President. I know everybody in the Cabinet. And I’m on close terms with the National Committee. Now, the committee is a little short of funds, so if you’ll just pay me so much a barrel, I’ll see that you get all the whiskey you want.”
His profiteering was so profligate that he was booted out of his short career as a government investigator and sent to the Atlanta Penitentiary for conspiracy to violate the Volstead Act. There Means wrote The Strange Death of President Harding, which stopped just short of accusing Mrs. Harding of trying to poison her husband. The scandalous book made the best-seller lists. When the royalty money ran out, Means hunted for Communists, clearing more than $1,000 a week from a handful of anti-Red organizations. In three years, he failed to find a single Communist.
The Lindbergh kidnapping presented a rare opportunity for Means, one he could not resist exploiting. On March 4, he visited Judge Marion DeVries in Washington’s Southern Building and claimed to have information that would lead to the location and safe return of the child. As soon as Means left the judge’s office, he frantically began casting a net throughout upper-echelon Washington.
He snared Evalyn Walsh McLean, the estranged wife of Edward B. McLean, the publisher of The Washington Post. Mrs. McLean, a friend of the Lindberghs, had once hired Means for some gumshoe work, but disputed the detective’s $8,000 bill for services rendered. After stringing her along for a few days with bizarre stories of his communications with the kidnappers, Means told Mrs. McLean that he needed $100,000 in ransom money and another $4,000 for expenses. The next evening, Means brought home the cash in a brown cardboard box tied with grocery tine.
Means then set about devising an elaborate plan to keep Mrs. McLean playing the con game. He assigned secret code numbers to everyone, including the kidnappers he had never met. He hired an old confederate to keep the telephones hot with messages, and even had him threaten Mrs. McLean to convince her that Means was nipping at the heels of the kidnappers.
By March 22, more than two weeks after his con game began, Means had talked Mrs. McLean into joining him in Aiken, North Carolina, where he said the kidnappers had promised to deliver the baby. When the kidnappers failed to show, Means claimed they had been frightened off by her presence. Then the two traveled to El Paso, Texas, where they were to obtain the baby across the Mexican border in Juarez, again without meeting the kidnappers. By skillfully using information gleaned from newspapers, Means hoodwinked Mrs. McLean into believing that he was in close communication with both the New Jersey police and FBI agents.
When this second rendezvous fell through, Means pleaded that the kidnappers had double-crossed him and now were asking for an additional $35,000. Mrs. McLean returned to Washington to get it, but she aroused the suspicions of her bankers and a friend at the Post. They eventually persuaded Mrs. McLean that she had been the victim of yet another Gaston Means con game.
When Mrs. McLean’s lawyers demanded the return of the $100,000, Means had a story ready.
“Didn’t Mrs. McLean get it?” he asked with the proper degree of shock. “She must have it. Her messenger met me at the bridge outside Alexandria as I was returning to Washington. He said, ‘I am Number Eleven [Mrs. McLean’s code designation].’ So what was I to do? I gave him the money.”
Means was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for the last of his big cons. During his trial, he testified with great animation in his own defense. After he finished his testimony, he lumbered off the stand and sat next to J. Edgar Hoover.
“Well, Hoover, what did you think of that?”
“Gaston,” Hoover replied, “it was a pack of lies.”
“Well,” Means said, ‘you’ve got to admit it made a whale of a story.”
Means was sent to Leavenworth. When Means fell ill, a team of FBI agents holed up in his hospital room to pry from him the location of the money. But Gaston Means had the last laugh. He died in prison on December 12, 1938, and speculation about the mysterious $100,000 kept his name in the newspapers for years.
COUNT JUAN J. TOMADELLI
The Magic Light Bulb
In a classic understatement, a Washington newspaper once described Count Juan J. Tomadelli as “something of a man of mystery.”
Though no one knew exactly how he became a count, Tomadelli clearly was a cultivated, if somewhat eccentric, man of means. Throughout the 1930s, he regally entertained the upper strata of Washington society at his luxurious suite in the Shoreham Hotel, and Tomadelli’s guests came to know him as an art collector and orchid fancier.
A few of the guests, if the count deemed to honor them with his confidence, learned about the light bulb. It required neither electricity nor wiring, Tomadelli said. It drew its energy from the earth’s atmosphere, and had been enthusiastically endorsed by the chairman of the board of General Electric Company. And best of all, the count said, the federal government was on the verge of placing an order for $300 million worth of the bulbs, which would be manufactured by Tomadelli Electronic Corporation of Delaware. Only one minor complication: Tomadelli painfully allowed that he was financially unable to promote the light bulb on his own, and would even consider parting with a few of his valuable old masters to raise the money needed. The invitation was as smooth as silk.
Some of the count’s marks purchased an oil painting or two (which turned out to be fakes); others offered to invest directly in the light-bulb business. One of them, Ernest M. Swingle, the owner of a chain of five-and-dime stores in New Jersey, was strung along for thirteen years, dispensing perhaps $400,000 in the process. By January 1941, when he was finally arrested by the FBI, Tomadelli had raked in more than $500,000.
L. FOSTER SMITH
Talent Scout Scoundrel
It’s not often that a major movie studio dispatches one of its top talent scouts to the nation’s capital, so when L. Foster Smith rolled into town in October 1943, the local business and entertainment world understandably was atwitter.
Capital Capers, the Warner Brothers extravaganza, was to star Bette Davis, John Garfield, and Pat O’Brien, plus the best theatrical talent Washington had to offer — which was the cast of Olsen and Johnson’s Sons o’ Fun revue, just preparing to open at the National Theatre.
Foster Smith checked into the Statler Hotel, whose management was most pleased to have him as a guest, and headed for the National Theatre, where the last rehearsal before opening night was in progress. Smith introduced himself to Ole Olsen, chatted a bit about the “Bette Davis picture” and show business in general, and asked to meet some of the stars of the revue. The Warner Brothers picture would be a “real break” for everyone, he said.
Over the next few days, he showed up at a big birthday bash for Ole Olsen at Washington’s Club Bali and announced that Bette Davis would be joining them shortly. (A little while later, Smith explained that Miss Davis’s airplane had, unfortunately, been grounded en route.) The Hollywood agent arranged another birthday party for Lionel Kaye, who played “Daffy” in the Sons o’ Fun show and was to have a leading role in Capital Capers. Smith also threw fabulous parties at the Club Troika, a snazzy nightspot, and Paul Young’s Romany Room. His grateful guests included the manager of the Statler Hotel, who had been kind enough to cash Smith’s $150 checks.
Smith even signed up eighteen chorus girls for $25-a-day parts in the movie, and began dating one of them. She was most disappointed when he hurriedly left Washington, destination unknown. So was the Statler Hotel, whose only souvenirs of Smith’s visit were dozens of unpaid bills, and a good number of Washington merchants, who now held his impressive-looking rubber checks.
L. Foster Smith left behind little more than his fingerprints, which the FBI used to identify him as Arnold Lester, a veteran con man who had been working Washington on and off since the early 1920s. His longest stay near Washington had been in 1929, when he was sentenced to a year and a day in the Lorton Reformatory. FBI agents traced Smith’s movements to Baltimore, to Toledo, Ohio, and then to Chicago, where they arrested him.
None of Smith’s victims suffered more than Lionel Kaye, who found his name affixed to some of the bogus talent scout’s bills; for a short while, Kaye was something of a laughingstock in Washington. “Poor Lionel,” said Ole Olsen. “He is usually a very frugal fellow. He doesn’t throw his money around and he stays in the less expensive hotels. But Smith offered him a part in the movie at a fabulous salary So Lionel moved over to the Statler, spent more money than he’s used to, bought his wife some new clothes. They were great pals — Lionel and Foster.”
“The man was convincing and showed me a wonderful time for a week,” Kaye said.
And even Kaye’s wife bore no trace of ill will toward L. Foster Smith. “Phony or no phony,” she told a reporter. “I had the most wonderful four days in my life.”
STANLEY CLIFFORD WEYMAN
The Great Impostor
Stanley Clifford Weyman, an actor of extraordinary verve and versatility, made his Washington debut in the summer of 1921 at a command performance for the president of the United States, Warren G. Harding. For his deft portrayal of a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, Weyman received front-page notices and two years in a federal penitentiary.
Weyman’s training had not been in the legitimate theater; he was a self-taught master of imposture, a con artist of the highest rank. Over the previous ten years, he passed himself off as U.S. consul-delegate to Morocco, military attaché to the Serbian Embassy, personal representative of Queen Marie of Rumania, Lieutenant Royal St. Cyr of the Army Aviation Corps, and chief medical supervisor of sanitary conditions in Lima, Peru, for an American construction firm.
But Weyman’s biggest coup began in July 1921 at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, where one day he showed up to seek an audience with Princess Fatima, Sultana of Kabul, Afghanistan. He arrived at the princess’s lavish suite dressed in striped pants and cutaway, and carrying a top hat and cane. “Tell Her Highness,” Weyman instructed one of the princess’s English-speaking sons, “that I am here as a naval liaison officer from the State Department to have Her Highness meet the Secretary of State.”
Princess Fatima was most pleased. She had come to the United States with the hope of arranging a million-dollar development loan for Afghanistan, but newspaper coverage of her visit had focused mostly on her bizarre purple robes and jeweled nose. Now, with “Lieutenant” Weyman on the scene, the wheels, she felt, finally were beginning to turn. He hired a private railroad car, escorted the princess and her royal retinue to Washington, and put them up in the Willard Hotel’s
finest suite.
Then, changing into the summer whites of a lieutenant commander in the Naval Medical Corps, Weyman rushed over to the State Department. In a meeting with the department’s protocol officers, he claimed important senators were demanding that the princess be allowed to meet with Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes. The conference was promptly arranged with due protocol.
At the close of the meeting, Weyman leaned over to one of the protocol officers and suggested that Princess Fatima would very much like to meet President Harding. That, too, was promptly arranged.
At the appointed hour, Weyman ushered the entire entourage to the White House and into Harding’s office. A string of naval officers standing at attention granted a degree of solemnity to the occasion, but Weyman broke the ice by cracking a few jokes with the president, who seemed to be nursing one of his nasty hangovers. Encouraged by his success, Weyman soon was slapping Harding on the back like an old drinking buddy. The naval officers looked on in utter horror; Princess Fatima and her sons, however, derived great enjoyment from it all.
As was customary, the entire group went out on the White House lawn for photographers, and Weyman did his best to ensure that he stayed in camera range. After Harding went back inside the White House, Weyman began his own impromptu news conference. There was the matter of the million-dollar loan, Weyman explained, which is why the princess had taken the trouble to come to Washington to meet with the President and Secretary Hughes. “One million to begin with,” he said. “Then several million more.” By the time Weyman had shepherded the entire party back to New York, he had managed to wrest from Princess Fatima at least $10,000 in expense money, plus the power of attorney to sell her forty-two-carat “River of Glory” diamond. But the princess became nervous when Weyman insisted on actually taking possession of the diamond, which he claimed he could easily sell in Atlantic City. When it became apparent to him she would not part with it, Weyman hastily exited.
Weyman’s fabulous fraud was not exposed until the next year, when one of Princess Fatima’s sons recognized his picture in a newspaper. Weyman had become an adviser to Dr. Adolph Lorenz of Vienna, whose theory of “bloodless surgery” had made him something of a celebrity. The authorities collared Weyman, charged him with impersonating a naval officer, and sentenced him to prison for a couple of years.
Weyman’s astonishing career of imposture stretched on for another thirty years, interrupted only by occasional prison terms. As physician to Pola Negri in 1925, he made all the arrangements for Rudolph Valentino’s funeral. He practiced law for a while, and during World War II ran an academy for draft dodgers. (When FBI agents raided his apartment on that charge, they stumbled upon Weyman’s impressive wardrobe: forty-three pairs of shoes, twenty-five suits, twenty-six jackets, 130 ties, and a sizable collection of headgear, including an admiral’s hat complete with plume.)
In 1948, Weyman managed to land a job as United Nations correspondent for the Washington-based Erwin News Agency, and soon after that he started a daily U.N. radio show for WFDR-FM. His guests included Andrei Gromyko of the Soviet Union and Eleanor Roosevelt. “He’s simply enchanting,” Mrs. Roosevelt said of Weyman.
After what turned out to be his last prison term, Weyman became night manager of the Dunwoodie Motel in Yonkers, New York. On August 25, 1950, two masked hold-up men shot him and stole $200 from the cash register. Police said that Weyman put up quite a fight. If that’s true, he died as the hero he had sought for forty years to be.
SAMUEL MUSSMAN
Bring on the Bombs
Sometime in 1946, peg-legged Samuel Mussman checked into Washington’s Hotel Statler, where he would reside for the next five years as Sam D. Mason. The smooth-talking, big-tipping guest had recently emerged from a prison term for his role in a $5 million stock swindle, and he had been jailed three times previously for selling nonexistent oil wells.
To bankroll his lavish life style and frequent excursions to Charles Town race track in West Virginia, Mussman set up shop as a “registered Washington agent” – a professional palm-greaser, in other words.
Mussman’s main con, notwithstanding its improbable story line, earned him hundreds of thousands of dollars. The federal government, he confided to his marks, fared an atomic attack and was undertaking a mammoth underground construction program. He had gotten wind of this top-secret plan, he said, from powerful friends at the White House. Soon, claimed Mussman, vast government warehouses and office buildings would be classified as “surplus” and rented out by Uncle Sam at the bargain rate of one dollar a year. There were millions to be made by re-leasing the buildings at commercial rates. All he needed to get the ninety-nine-year leases, Mussman said, was some “sewer money” to spread around in the right places.
Among his marks in the scheme were two Greek Orthodox priests, representing the Order of St. Basil the Great, who handed over $200,000 in exchange for “options” on all federal buildings in New York City. Mussman told them the profits would be large enough to build a school, enlarge their church, and run a summer camp for poor children. “Don’t be afraid,” he reassured them. “You’re not going to lose anything.”
So the priests came to Washington carrying satchels stuffed with $100, $50, and $20 bills. Mussman promised they would meet General George C. Marshall and President Truman, but they only got as far as something Mussman called the “Engineers Building,” where Mussman relieved the pair of their satchels, limped inside, and reappeared fifteen minutes later. The deed was done, Mussman told them: The right people received the money.
By the time Mussman was called before a special Senate committee investigating influence-peddling in the nation’s capital, he had squandered upwards of $350,000 in “sewer money,” most of it at the race track. He told the senators, however, that he had turned over the money to an elusive mysterious middleman known as “Mr. Eungart,” who gave back twenty-five percent of it to him for expenses. Mr. Eungart was so mysterious that neither Mussman nor Senate investigators could find any trace of him.
Mussman’s exchanges with Chairman Clyde Hoey of North Carolina brought waves of laughter to the Senate hearing room. The chairman asked Mussman if he had ever concealed money in his artificial leg.”Only once, Senator,” Mussman replied. “You only got to let one person know and you got no leg and you got no money.”
“Why did you stay in the racing game if you lost more money than you won?” the senator inquired at another point. “That’s why I am here,” Mussman answered.
“Did you ever lease any government building?” Chairman Hoey asked. “I haven’t yet,” Mussman replied gamely, “but I hope to.”
He never got the chance. After convictions for perjury, grand larceny, and income-tax evasion, Mussman was fined $10,000 and sentenced to a term at the Lorton Reformatory, where he suffered a fatal stroke in 1954.
DAVID GILLESPIE
The Original Lottery Scam
Throughout the early years of the nineteenth century the city of Washington was in sorry financial shape, enfeebled by its inability to raise money. Vast stretches of the city proper still were cow pastures or swampland, hardly befitting the capital of a nation. Congress had appropriated $10,000 to build Pennsylvania Avenue between the President’s house and Capitol Hill (the route had been virtually impassable), but when it came to matters that held few benefits or conveniences for the legislators themselves, Washington was left largely to fend for itself.
So the Corporation of the City of Washington, in some desperation, turned to a mammoth money-making scheme that would be resuscitated, coincidentally, more than 150 years later: a municipal lottery.
Privately issued lotteries had been springing up willy-nilly for some time; in the little “fortune offices” that lined Pennsylvania Avenue, customers could buy tickets in the Cathedral Church Lottery and the New York Literature Lottery, for example, among many others. Washington’s civic leaders reasoned that the city government should have a piece of the action, too. A lottery was, after all, infinitely more attractive than the prospect of raising taxes.
With congressional and presidential approval, Washington’s common council and board of aldermen planned a series of lotteries to raise money for the construction and endowment of two public schools, a jail, and a much-needed city hall. By 1815, seven city fathers, prominent Washingtonians in every respect, were charged with supervising the lotteries.
One minor matter, however, seemed likely to doom the project from the start: None of them knew anything about the
lottery business.
Enter one David Gillespie of New York City, who managed to purchase the pending lotteries — as well as all future ones — by guaranteeing the city of Washington the maximum revenues authorized by Congress: $10,000 a year. The local lottery managers, who had been appointed by the mayor, were happy to be relieved of the responsibility.
Here was a professional promoter at work. Gillespie promptly set up shop on Pennsylvania Avenue, consolidating the drawings into a single Grand National Lottery with a Grand Capital Prize of $50,000. “This lottery,” one of Gillespie’s advertisements said, “offers a superior chance for a large prize; also a great inducement to adventures in consequence of its speedy completion.”
City officials braced themselves for a financial bonanza, and with great ceremony laid the cornerstone of the new city hall on August 23, 1820. The Grand National Lottery rolled on and on, selling nearly 31,000 tickets, but by late 1822 the only money actually tendered from Gillespie’s till was the grand sum of $300 for architectural plans.
The seven appointed lottery managers, still legally responsible for the prizes, began to wonder whether something was wrong. While they wondered, Gillespie slipped out of town with an amount reported to exceed $3oo,ooo. The city itself became entangled in lawsuits filed by disgruntled holders of ‘winning” tickets, and eventually was released from more than $198,000 in judgments only by a ruling of the Supreme Court.
In 1873, the federal government paid Washington $75,000 for its unfinished city hall, proposing to make it the District of Columbia Courthouse. The building was not finally completed until 1919, nearly one hundred years after David Gillespie waltzed through Washington.
As for lotteries, noted one Washington historian, “No further attempts were made to raise money by this method.” At least not until 1982.
FREDERICK EMERSON PETERS
The Check Is in the Mail
As FBI agent William H. Welch walked through the lobby Washington’s Lafayette Hotel in 1952, he noticed someone he had
never mer but had every reason to recognize. Welch went up to the man, a distinguished-looking elderly gentleman, and said, point blank, “You’re Frederick Emerson Peters.”
“Why, no,” the man replied, “I’m Paul Carpenter, a reporter doing publicity for the Montevideo Music Festival.” What’s more, the man added, he had just flown in from New York for an “important appointment at the State Department” to discuss festival details.
Welch was certain he had made no mistake, so he took the man in for fingerprints — fingerprints that confirmed he was none other than Frederick Emerson Peters, who had spent the last six months on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted Men” list.
Peters, his identity revealed, looked up at the FBI agent and smiled. “Been a lot of fun, hasn’t it?”
Indeed it had. For half a century Peters had smooth-talked his way across America as one of the nation’s most prolific bad-check artists. Victims invariably described him as an engaging and erudite conversationalist, conservative in dress and manner. In the nation’s capital, Peters could easily pass for a politician, a university professor, or a bibliophile.
His profits were penny-ante — his rubber checks frequently netted him no more than $10 or $15 — and intentionally so, for Peters did not enjoy the lifestyle of his comrades in con. He preferred libraries to limousines.
After his inopportune meeting with Welch, Peters was dispatched to Lorton Reformatory on a three-to-nine-year term for forged-check and false-pretense charges. During his six years in prison, Peters used his $69 monthly Social Security checks to order books and art objects from New York dealers (and an occasional box of Havana cigars), and to make modest contributions to charities.
Upon his release in August 1958, Peters tried to go legit in the nation’s capital. He landed a job as the nighttime desk clerk at a small hotel. He was a regular communicant at the National Cathedral and a volunteer at the Church of Saint Stephen and the Incarnation, where the Reverend Stuart Gast remembered him as ‘warmhearted and helpful.”
By now, Frederick Emerson Peters was seventy-two years old. He accounted for several overstuffed file drawers in the FBI records building, largely owing to the 130 or so aliases he had used over the years, among them Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., Gifford Pinchot II, and Philip Wylie. He had single-handedly assembled and indexed a library of more than 15,000 volumes at the McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. In 1920, he had one of his many prison sentences commuted by President Woodrow Wilson.
These were remarkable, perhaps singular, accomplishments in his chosen profession, ones on which Peters might have retired with some satisfaction. Instead, however, he made Washington the embarkation point for his final spree as a confidence man.
One day Peters stopped by the headquarters of the American Peace Society at 1207 New Hampshire Avenue, N.W; he introduced himself as a retired professor from Western Reserve University in Cleveland at work on a biography of a former president of the school who once served as the Peace Society’s vice president. The directors of the organization, including General Ulysses S. Grant III, were pleased. They assigned Peters a desk at the society and once invited him to dinner at the Cosmos Club.
When his “research work” ended, Peters left, taking with him a batch of blank checks and a list of authorized signatories. He headed for Baltimore, where, as R.A. Coleman of the American Peace Society, he saw Louis D. Hupfeld, the city’s leading engraver of fine silver. “Mr. Coleman” painstakingly described a chalice and paten the society wished to present to the National Cathedral. The silversmith, honored by the prestigious assignment, proceeded to work up an estimate, which carne to $25.”How much extra,” Mr. Coleman wondered, “would it cost to engrave the chalice with the symbol of peace —a dove?”
Hupfeld figured the extra engraving would be $15, and Mr. Coleman evidently was pleased. He offered an American Peace Society check made out to himself in the amount of $250 and ostensibly signed by Ulysses S. Grant III. After accepting the $10 in change, he lingered around the shop for a bit to chat with the silversmith about his craft.
By the time Hupfeld learned of the society’s stop-payment order, Frederick Emerson Peters was in New York.
“You know” Hupfeld later told a magazine writer, “I was so sold on the old boy that I would have handed over $ 100 if he had asked for it. He didn’t want to take me for even as much as $25 — so he thought up the peace dove to make the bill $240. I’m keeping the chalice as a souvenir to show my customers.”
In New York, Peters passed along some more Peace Society paper — just enough to pay his expenses — and then headed for New Haven, Connecticut, where he checked into Room 510 of the Hotel Taft as Dr. B.A. Morris. In the early morning hours of July 25, 1959, he suffered a stroke in his sleep and died without regaining consciousness.
Had hotel officials not examined his personal effects in an effort to notify the next of kin, Peters’s death might have gone unnoticed. “They looked at his stuff to see who he was,” an FBI agent explained, “and hell, he was everybody.”
Sidebar: A Compendium of Small Cons
This article originally appeared in the July/August 2000 issue of Regardie’s Power.
Bill Hogan