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 Adams Chronicles. President John Quincy Adams cashed in his accumulated investment of $9,000 in government bonds to bankroll his brother-in-law’s new business, a gristmill on Rock Creek. President Adams lost his shirt in the venture. Crime Didn’t Pay Then, Either. In the earliest days of Rock Creek Park, many of its roads and bridges were built by chain
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
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