Empire of Deception

by Dean Jobb

  How well he would hold up in prison, and for how long, was an open question. Con men were among the lowest of the low in Joliet’s hierarchy, shunned and almost as detested as sexual offenders. They tended to be older and better educated than the men locked up with them, and had betrayed the only things that mattered inside—loyalty and trust. Leo would be trapped in this hellish world for at least a year, and if Crowe and the chief justice had their way, he would be behind bars until 1931. Even if he managed to win early parole, or Governor Small was feeling generous with his pardons, his legal troubles were far from over. Crowe could reinstate the withdrawn indictment and send him back to prison, and the next judge might not be as lenient. The state’s attorney was also sitting on a complaint that Leo had embezzled $90,000 as trustee of the estate of the publisher Daniel Stern. And there was the prospect of a federal prosecution after his release. In reality, US District Attorney Edwin Olson had concluded that no judge in Chicago would send Leo back to prison for using the mail to defraud, not after he had been convicted under Illinois law for what amounted to the same offense. Federal charges were quietly dropped. Leo, it appears, was never informed of the district attorney’s decision. But it would have made little difference as he faced the bleak years ahead.

  No one suspected it yet, but Leo had an escape plan.

  A FEW DAYS BEFORE 1924 made way for a new year, Leo was relieved of his work duties. He was so ill he no longer had the strength to wander the prison yard with his pointed stick. He had lost twenty pounds in less than a month, dropping his weight to below 150. His voice was a hoarse whisper and his pale skin had taken on a sickly copper hue. On December 26 he was admitted to the prison hospital, a grim stone building with steel-barred windows. Leo was put on a restricted diet, and Fletcher administered insulin shots to try to reverse the ravages of diabetes. The new drug, doctors had found, prevented some patients from lapsing into a coma, the final stage of the disease. He was unable to sleep and, by one account, begged for narcotics to ease his pain.

  “Koretz’s condition is serious,” Fletcher told the press. “He is steadily growing worse despite our treatments … it is a question if his vitality will respond.” The press offered conflicting reports. The Daily Tribune described him as on his deathbed; the Daily News countered that death did not appear imminent.

  About noon on January 7, Leo slipped into a coma. Prison officials did not contact his family until the following day. Emil, Adolph, and Mentor rushed to Joliet. Leo’s brothers stood vigil beside his cot for several hours, but he never regained consciousness. Mentor could not bear to see his father, not even to say good-bye, and waited in the warden’s office.

  Mae was notified but received the message late in the day. Despite all the heartache and disgrace she had endured, despite her resolve to never see him again, she boarded a train for Joliet.

  At 8:40 in the evening of January 8, Leo took a last deep breath. His brothers had retreated to the warden’s office to join Mentor. A guard, Michael Leonard, was the only witness to his final moments. Leo Koretz—the man hailed in the Chicago press as the “king of con men” and “the greatest swindler of all time,” the flamboyant entertainer and lavish spender—was dead at age forty-five. He had served thirty-four days of his sentence.

  The news was relayed to Mae when her train arrived at the Joliet station about an hour later. “If I had only known that Leo was in such a critical condition I would have been down before,” she said. “I would have liked to have told him goodbye.”

  The body was released to his family the following morning. Mae asked to see him at the funeral home of O’Neil and Barry in Joliet and emerged from the viewing room in tears, leaning on Mentor for support. She returned to Chicago to finalize the arrangements for burial that afternoon. Mentor and Adolph stayed behind to accompany the body to Waldheim Cemetery in the western suburb of Forest Park. Adolph was handed $44.32; it was all the money Leo had left when he died.

  THE FUNERAL WAS SIMPLE and swift. “No crowds; no elaborate funeral cortege; no pallbearers; no heaped up flowers; still fewer heaped up eulogies,” noted the Daily Tribune’s Genevieve Forbes Herrick. “Nothing but the minimum for the man who always loved the maximum.”

  A hearse pulled into the cemetery about half past three, with a car carrying Adolph and Mentor close behind. The vehicles stopped about fifty feet from the gate, where a mound of wet clay glistened on the snow-covered ground. A shovel had been discarded in haste and lay on top of the pile. A knot of relatives and friends, no more than fifty in all, gathered at the graveside. A gray granite headstone bearing the letter K in Gothic script and KORETZ in capitals marked the family plot and bore the name of Leo’s father, Henry. Leo would be laid to rest alongside his long-dead oldest brother, Max. The coffin, as gray as the headstone, emerged from the hearse. A spray of pink roses on the lid and a wreath of roses and narcissi served as the only floral tributes. The sky was clear and a bright winter blue; the sun was low in the sky and struggling to keep the temperature above freezing.

  Mae stood at the foot of the grave, encased in black. The collar of her coat, pulled up to hide her face from photographers, muffled her sobs. Julius, Ferdinand, Adolph, and Emil, accompanied by their wives, looked on. If Ludwig was there, none of the reporters hovering on the sidelines recognized him. A sister-in-law clung to Mae’s arm, and Mentor stood with them, wiping tears from his eyes. Mari was thought to be too young to see her father buried; Leo’s mother, who had barely survived his exposure as a fraud, was too weak and too ill to attend. The mood was somber and restrained. Few of the other mourners shed tears for the man who had disgraced his entire family.

  Rabbi Felix Levy of Emanuel Congregation conducted the service. “In the grave all sins are forgotten,” he said, perhaps thinking for a moment of the money he had sunk into worthless Bayano stock. He recited the Kaddish, a traditional funeral prayer, in Hebrew. “He was joined to us not only in bonds of blood but in bonds of love,” the rabbi continued, in English. “The link in the family chain that has been broken will be reunited soon in another world.”

  The pink roses shivered in the breeze as the coffin was lowered. “The pain of life, which he had already begun to know,” Levy intoned, “has been changed for the peace of death.”

  Herrick, the Trib reporter, overheard the whispered comment of one of the cemetery employees. “Most people who had done a thing like this couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground,” the man said, gesturing. “They’d have been put ’way back there.”

  Mourners at Leo’s graveside on January 9, 1925. A Chicago Daily Tribune reporter described the swindler’s modest funeral as “the minimum for the man who always loved the maximum.”

  Levy lifted a lump of clay. “Earth to earth,” he recited as he tossed it onto the coffin. At two minutes past four, the service was over. The mourners dispersed, and the men who would have buried Leo in less hallowed ground retrieved their shovels and closed the grave.

  Herrick searched for the right words to capture the moment, to close the final chapter of the Bayano oil swindle. They appeared in the next day’s Tribune.

  “Leo Koretz,” she wrote, “the man who loved superlatives, the man who bought things by the dozens, the score, the gross; Leo, the lavish host who had a hospitality complex, is left alone.”

  THEN, TWO DAYS AFTER the funeral, a front-page headline in the Herald and Examiner reported Leo’s death as a suicide: REVEAL KORETZ KILLED SELF WITH SWEETS: LURED DEATH BY SCORNING SUGAR TABOO.

  The paper’s source was Fletcher, the prison doctor, who revealed that Leo had smuggled a three-pound box of chocolates into Joliet. How he had managed to slip the contraband past guards and prison staff—on his own or through an accomplice on visitors’ day—Fletcher did not say. Leo had finished off the box before it could be confiscated.

  “Candy was poison to Koretz,” the paper explained. “No more so than to any other incurable diabetic. But it was poison,” making suicide “a reasonable conclusion.” Syrup often a
ccompanied prison meals, giving him easy access to more sugar. Guards monitoring the mess hall had watched Leo swap the food on his plate for extra servings of syrup and reckoned he consumed twice as much as the other inmates.

  Whether chocolates and syrup had killed Leo, let alone whether he had eaten them in a bizarre bid to commit suicide, Fletcher could not say. Diabetics craved sugar-rich foods to replace the glucose their bodies were unable to process, which was why one of the treatments employed in severe cases, in preinsulin days, was a starvation diet and the gradual reintroduction of calories, in hopes of restoring normal digestion. Leo may have been unable to control his cravings or he may have known exactly what he was doing. While it was “uncommon” for diabetics to deliberately overeat to commit suicide, an American authority on the disease had noted a few years earlier, it was not unheard of. And a diabetic “could kill himself by eating sugar,” Fletcher conceded.

  Leo had returned to Chicago, Fletcher believed, convinced he did not have long to live. And he had cheated justice as brazenly as he had cheated Bayano investors. All his talk about atoning for his crimes and paying back the money he had stolen was just that—talk. Leo had predicted his prison term would be a death sentence, and he had been right.

  “Leo Koretz gave up,” Fletcher told the Herald and Examiner. “His death, in my opinion, was due to the letdown in the manner of his living. Believing himself to be afflicted with an incurable ailment, he abandoned all caution and restraint and indulged in dissipations that at least aggravated, if they did not cause, the condition in which we found him when he entered the penitentiary.”

  “He didn’t care what happened. He became a fatalist. He thought he was going to die. He thought he would live recklessly while he lived. He did. And he died.”

  OR DID HE?

  Two months after the hasty funeral, Bayano investors began to hear rumors that Leo was alive and had been seen in Halifax.

  Someone had died on January 8, 1925, in the hospital in the Joliet prison, someone had been buried in Waldheim Cemetery the following day—but was it Leo? Was it possible the man who had fooled his relatives and closest friends for so long had faked his own death? Leo had escaped from the United States and evaded police for almost a year; could he have feigned illness as part of a plot to escape?

  A rabbi, who was not identified in the press—it may have been Felix Levy—notified the authorities, and the story soon hit the newspapers. “I have heard,” the rabbi told federal prosecutors in Chicago, “that another body—the remains of some poor unfortunate who had died of tuberculosis—was buried in the coffin marked with the name of Koretz. Leo has gone back to Canada, where he has friends who will protect him indefinitely. My authority for this story is excellent. Koretz has been seen by men who know him and they are positive.”

  The office of the state’s attorney was notified. Crowe was prepared to have the body exhumed to find out who was buried in the Koretz family plot. “This is certainly worth an investigation,” he told the press. “Go ahead and dig him up.”

  An investigator was assigned to find out whether Leo had pulled one last swindle. The rumor gained some traction when it was pointed out that a single guard had been with him when he died and that since the funeral service had been conducted at the graveside, the casket had been closed.

  Joliet’s warden, John Whitman, assured the state’s attorney that prison officials had been aware “that rumors of suicide or fraud might be expected” if Leo died, and had taken precautions. Medical specialists had been called in to confirm the seriousness of his diabetes. After he died, Whitman said, dozens of people who had seen him since his arrival at Joliet had viewed the body, and all of them confirmed it was Leo. The dead man’s fingerprints had been taken, and they matched the set recorded when Leo was admitted in December. Further confirmation came from reporters who had accompanied him on the drive to the prison and had seen his body at the funeral home. And, of course, Mae, Mentor, and two of his brothers had viewed the body before the casket was closed. The investigation concluded there was no need for an exhumation.

  “It is obvious that Koretz is dead,” conceded an official of the state’s attorney’s office. But given Leo’s track record of deception, he added, “there seems to be no reason to apologize for having made an inquiry.”

  Fletcher, the prison doctor who was being cast in the role of Leo’s latest dupe, went public to squelch the rumors and defend his reputation. “The man who died January 8,” he told the press, “was the man who gave his name as Leo Koretz when he was received at the prison a month before his death.”

  It was “preposterous,” prison officials said, to suggest that Leo had somehow managed to cheat death and fool his captors with one grand, final swindle. “Koretz is dead,” Joliet’s assistant warden insisted, “and the rumor is absurd.”

  As absurd and as preposterous, perhaps, as the notion that somewhere, deep in the jungles of Panama, there flowed a river of black gold.

  Leo’s swindle—and his many love affairs—became fodder for crime magazines, and his story made the cover of the October 1938 issue of Inside Detective.

  EPILOGUE

  ROW UPON ROW of headstones and vaults fan out from Des Plaines Avenue in Forest Park, about ten miles west of the Loop. Just inside gate 46 of Waldheim Cemetery, on lot 102 of section 4, a monument squats beside a graveled access lane.

  The stone bears the names of Leo’s parents. Marie died in 1927, in her eightieth year, her passing deemed worthy of a brief news item—thanks to her son—in at least one Chicago paper. Two smaller stones face it, one for Max, the brother who died young, and the other for Louise, a sister who passed away in 1933. A fourth, only a few feet from the access lane, is square and plain and looks more like a thick slab of patio stone than a grave marker. Grass almost obscures the single word chiseled into one edge: SON.

  This modest, all-but-anonymous memorial marks the final resting place of Leo Koretz.

  Leo seemed destined to be remembered as one of history’s most proficient fraud artists. His bizarre death-by-chocolate demise alone should have earned him a lasting place in the popular imagination. The Herald and Examiner proclaimed him—no doubt to the chagrin of the Yellow Kid—the “greatest confidence man Chicago ever produced.” The New York Times stood in awe of his audacity and formidable powers of persuasion. “Leo Koretz bears witness against that ancient fallacy that business men lack imagination,” an editorial writer noted. “Perhaps it is as well for us that the prosaic minions of the law intervened before he went down to Wall Street, there to cast his poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling, from this sordid, exiguous earth to the blue sky of heaven.”

  And for many years after his death, Leo’s name was almost as synonymous with rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul swindles as Ponzi’s would become. A lawyer who fled Chicago in 1929 with money he was supposed to have invested for his friends was a “second Leo Koretz.” The Bayano fraud was still notorious enough in the 1940s that the authors of a criminology textbook referenced Leo, only by his surname, as a member of the “swindling brigade who made their reputations at the expense of unwary investors.”

  Leo’s exploits—and in particular his many love affairs—proved irresistible to the editors of the true-crime and detective magazines he had loved so much to read. His story was first featured in a 1938 edition of Inside Detective under the breathless cover headline TOO MANY WOMEN! THE SENSATIONAL SWINDLES OF LEO KORETZ. Embellished accounts followed in the pulp magazines of the fifties, from Master Detective to For Men Only, often illustrated with photos of women in provocative poses. “With oil he was master of them all,” one article began, “but he learned too late never to trust a blonde.” Leo picked up more mistresses, a raft of new aliases, a sixty-foot yacht for cruising Lake Michigan, and a yellow Rolls-Royce, just like the Great Gatsby’s, for his trips from Pinehurst to Halifax. But the best-researched article, in True: The Man’s Magazine, written in 1952 by future Pulitzer Prize winner W. A. Swanberg, was dead-on in its de
scription of Leo as “the swindler of the century” and “probably the most skillful propagandist of the pre-Goebbels era.” Ben Hecht, the Chicago journalist-turned-playwright who had a ringside seat to the collapse of the Bayano bubble, added a further twist. He recalled the “prince of thieves” in his 1954 memoir, A Child of the Century, and claimed that one of Leo’s girlfriends smuggled in the box of chocolates that killed him in Joliet, a tantalizing but invented detail often repeated when brief accounts of Leo’s fraud surfaced in magazine articles or in anthologies of famous crimes and swindles.

  But Charles Ponzi and his postal-coupon scheme have eclipsed Leo’s fake Panamanian oil wells in the popular imagination. Ponzi continued to make headlines long after Leo’s death, pulling a land fraud in Florida and ending up back in prison in 1927 to serve an additional seven-year term for his postal-coupon fraud. He was released from prison in 1934 and deported to Italy and died penniless in South America in 1949. His name was invoked so often when dividends-from-capital swindles were exposed that the Encyclopaedia Britannica recognized the term Ponzi scheme in 1957 and the Oxford English Dictionary soon followed suit. Leo had devised his more elaborate and more brazen schemes more than a decade before Ponzi came along; he was a marathoner who was running long after Ponzi’s hundred-yard dash ended in a prison cell. Fame and notoriety, however, went to the fraudster who stumbled first and died last. It is fitting, perhaps, that a man who spent much of his life cheating others was cheated out of his rightful place in the history of financial scams.