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
For nearly two years, the statue of Alexander “Boss” Shepherd has languished in storage on the grounds of the Blue Plains sewage plant in Southeast D.C. Shepherd, who was profiled in last month’s cover story, ruled Washington with an iron hand for a short period in the early 1870s. His statue graced the front of the District Building on Pennsylvania Avenue for many years, but was removed during the construction
Boss Shepherd’s unabashed use of his self-proclaimed “law of necessity” during his reign as the District’s kingpin insured a steady diet of confrontational politics. Of course, the Boss usually won. Stories about Shepherd’s fights with those who stood in his way are legion, but perhaps his most celebrated confrontation was with John W. Garrett, the powerful president of the
When cartoonist Thomas Nast of Harper’s Weekly laid pen to paper in the spring of 1874, it no longer was poised to savagely ridicule William Marcy “Boss” Tweed. Three years earlier, after a long reign as the crooked kingpin of New York’s Tammany Ring, Tweed had been convicted of larceny and forgery and put behind bars. Nast’s cartoons had