by Amy Reading
Thus began act six as the three men commenced an intricate, tightly spiraled dance around the topic of personal finance. Spencer and Furey proceeded to give the mark the breakdown, gently sussing Norfleet out to determine how much money they could squeeze from him. Norfleet, to his credit, led by staunchly informing the others that he had no money. Gradually, though, the image of those cash bundles waiting patiently in their vault worked on his mind, until finally he guessed that maybe he could raise, oh, about $20,000 from his bank. Spencer thought he could scare up $35,000 from his home in Salina, Kansas, and Furey promised to cover the rest.
Furey and Spencer’s work in Dallas was nearly done, and Furey would soon be able to relinquish his costly hotel room. The seventh act of the play was to put the mark on the send to collect the money from his bank. This is always a fragile juncture in the big con’s script. When a mark goes back home, he is potentially vulnerable to the sounder wisdom of his loved ones. Yet the underworld is rife with stories of marks whose bankers flatly informed them that they were in the midst of a con, yet who withdrew their money anyway and returned to their new friends.
Norfleet’s crew took no chances. Spencer’s initial approach to Norfleet gave him the perfect excuse to accompany the Texan back to Hale County: he would inspect Norfleet’s ranch and make his final decision about acquiring it for the Green Immigration Land Company. Under the guise of sifting the soil through his fingers, assessing the rental properties, and walking the ranch’s fence line, Spencer kept Norfleet under constant surveillance for the next three days. As he sat at the kitchen table and ate Eliza Norfleet’s meals, he diligently questioned the couple about the ranch’s operation, stoking Norfleet’s cupidity with his steady interest. At last, he announced that he was quite impressed with Norfleet’s farming and would purchase the land for $102,600—more than enough to cover Norfleet’s debt on the Slaughter ranch. Their business concluded most satisfactorily, Norfleet and Spencer headed back to Dallas, stopping at Norfleet’s bank in Plainview to borrow the cash.
The mark had successfully passed under his wife’s discerning eye. He’d said all the right things to his banker, and he held the actual cash under his arm. Norfleet was primed and ready for the eighth act, taking off the touch, when the money under his arm would vanish before he’d quite realized that he’d handed it over. Yet Spencer witnessed something at Norfleet’s ranch that convinced him the cowboy was good for another go-round. Was it the ease with which Norfleet conjured up the money, was it the sanguinity of his wife, was it the untouched savings account that was the land itself? Spencer toted up the evidence before his eyes and concluded that Norfleet’s gullibility was nowhere near exhausted. Once in Dallas, the two men received a telegram from Furey informing them that business had taken him to Fort Worth and instructing them to meet him there at the Terminal Hotel, where they’d be able to post their money and communicate long-distance with the Dallas exchange. And in Fort Worth, they played the con for Norfleet all over again.
Wind the reel back to the day that Furey took Norfleet to the Dallas Cotton Exchange, then replay those same scenes in Fort Worth: the brief glimpse of the exchange, the return to the hotel room for the intense mental effort of code deciphering, the identification of a sure bet. Furey suggested that prior to posting their pool of money on the exchange to free up the money in the Dallas vault, they place the $68,000 pool on United Brokers’ current stock pick. “This is our last day on the anxious seat,” he reassured them. He wrote out the option order and gave it to Spencer to deliver. Spencer returned just minutes later and brandished his receipt triumphantly, but when Furey examined it, he cried, “Spencer, you have ruined us! You have lost every dollar we have and that we had coming to us.” Spencer had exactly reversed Furey’s instructions and had purchased instead of sold the shares. As suddenly as they had grown rich, the three men were now in deep debt.
Spencer began to weep with grief. He confessed that the $35,000 he’d just lost was all the money he’d inherited from his dead mother and that his father would probably disown him when he found out. “I could knock your head off, you poor miserable wretch!” Furey said in disgust. But then he sighed and explained that they just might salvage their money. Like an older brother perpetually righting the disasters of his young charges, Furey set off for the exchange to try to hedge the loss before the market closed for the day. He managed to place one order, selling $80,000 worth of stock at a two-point margin for a profit of $160,000, of which one-third was Norfleet’s. His vaulted treasure had just swelled from $28,000 to $45,000. That evening, Charles Gerber, the secretary of the Fort Worth exchange, visited them in their hotel room. In contrast to the easy professionalism of Furey, Spencer, and Ward, Gerber’s manner was distinctly menacing, his eyes and mouth mere slashes cut into his doughy face. Gerber made the now-familiar objection that as nonmembers Norfleet and Spencer were technically unable to bid on the Fort Worth exchange, and to claim their earnings, they were required to guarantee their bid by posting the amount of their profit.
Without an instant’s hesitation, Norfleet again traveled to Hale County to raise the funds. His wife chided him for indulging in speculation but otherwise let him off easy and encouraged him to see the deal through to the end. Norfleet borrowed $25,000 from his brother-in-law and returned with the cash to Fort Worth. It was an identical replay of the previous sequence of events, but with one minor deviation that the swindlers would soon discover. This time, when Norfleet collected the money, he also stuck a .32-caliber automatic in his coat pocket.
The three men reconvened at the Westbrook Hotel in Fort Worth and pooled their money. They had raised a total of $70,000, still $10,000 shy of their target. Spencer proposed to cover the deficit by traveling to Austin to cash in some hitherto-unmentioned Liberty Bonds, after which he would wire the money directly to Norfleet. The men agreed that Furey would take the cash they had raised so far to Dallas the next morning, where his company was transferring him for additional trading, and there he would apply it toward the due bill, and then deposit the final installment when it arrived from Austin.
Why that bothersome $10,000 shortfall? Furey and Spencer had pretended to raise $45,000 to complement Norfleet’s $25,000; why not pretend to have raised the full amount, to stave off the mark’s suspicion and hurry the play along to its denouement? Once again, what looks like an unnecessary and distracting detail conceals an elegant function. Furey and Spencer were paving the way for the final scene of the big con in which they blow off or cool out the mark. The swindlers design the endgame so that the mark willingly returns to his regular life without complaint. The expulsion from the con might be violent, as when the swindlers fake a bloody shoot-out and convince the mark to flee before the police arrive. More commonly, though, this stage is peaceful, bureaucratic, and frustratingly elongated so that the mark never quite knows when the con has ended. The error that defers the big payout is merely procedural—Spencer’s $10,000, say, never arrives from Austin—and the mark must meet one of his swindlers in yet another city to resolve the mix-up. The mark travels out of state for the rendezvous, only to be redirected to another city, then another, and so on until he finally gives up and returns home, crestfallen, poorer, but wiser.
Sometimes the mark is so thoroughly cooled he doesn’t even realize he’s been conned. Some have invested so much of their hopes in the promise of a fast buck that even their swifter losses barely dent their ardor. They remain convinced of the viability of the con man’s scheme, believing only that they’ve suffered the kind of unlucky break inevitable in business—and in gambling. Some victims actually seek out their swindlers a second time, begging for a chance to up the ante and throw more money at the big treasure just beyond their reach. In swindling argot, they’re addicts.
That night in the Westbrook, Spencer and Furey took the precaution of searching Norfleet’s belongings, and they discovered the gun in his overcoat. Was Norfleet smart to the con? He had come this far and hadn’t kicked to the police,
so they couldn’t be sure. They knew the next day would require a light touch, and above all else they mustn’t appear to be manipulating their mark’s actions. When Norfleet searched for his coat the next morning and couldn’t find it or the gun, they said nothing. When he casually stated that he was going out on a small errand, again they said nothing; they played out his invisible rope and let him out of the hotel room alone. Furey swiftly packed for his trip to Dallas and was nearly finished when Norfleet returned to the Westbrook. The two swindlers waited, poised, for Norfleet to confront them, and he did, but it was merely to pose a change of plans. Norfleet said that he was unwilling to let Furey take off with the money; he wanted to hold on to his portion of the cash until the full amount had been raised and the partners could make the final settlement at the exchange together. Furey imperceptibly exhaled. Norfleet’s words did not live up to their fears, and they were not enough to deter Furey from his script. He imperiously brushed aside Norfleet’s objections, then rolled up the money in some newspaper, stuck the bundle under his arm, and went into the hall to ring for the elevator.
But Norfleet wasn’t done with his confrontation. He followed Furey into the hall and jammed a double-action Smith and Wesson between the newspaper bundle and Furey’s ribs. “You are going back to the room to settle the matter, or this will be as good a place to settle it as any,” Norfleet growled.
“Don’t do anything rash, for God’s sake! I will go back to the room,” Furey cried.
As he reentered the hotel room, Norfleet swung the gun at Spencer, who stayed perfectly in character and grew instantly histrionic. He grabbed a chair and raised it over his head, then thought better and seized a Bible, which he placed over his heart. As Norfleet began shouting that his friends were “partners” and “first-class crooks,” Spencer blubbered, “Before my Angel Mother, on my bended knees, with this Bible uplifted to my God in Heaven, I swear to you that I never did, nor never will prove false to you, and that I never did see this man before I met you.” It was an ad-libbed speech. If a mark gets wise, the standard script calls for roughing him up and knocking him out long enough to make an escape.
Curiously, Norfleet would later tell two different versions of what happened next. In one, Furey gave in, contemptuously throwing the bundle on the bed and saying, “Take the money and go to blazes with it if you can’t stand by the agreement we made.” If this is the way it went down, it would have been a classic move, keeping the mark on the defensive. Furey would not have been above deliberately inviting Norfleet’s skepticism, part of a ploy to demonstrate that he did not have as much at stake as the mark did. Norfleet did not relish considering himself someone who had welshed on a deal, and it took him only a few seconds to realize that without Furey’s cooperation, he’d still be $20,000 in debt and unable to ransom his profit.
In the second version, Furey broke the tension with a truly brilliant bit of improvisation. As Norfleet waved the gun around and Spencer shouted and cried, Furey grew quiet. Catching Norfleet’s eye, Furey made a Master Mason’s grand hailing sign of distress: he extended both his arms out from his shoulders and raised his forearms up at the elbows like a goalpost and then lowered them to his sides three times in swift succession. The gambit worked, and Norfleet pocketed the gun, wholly unwilling to threaten a brother lodge member. Furey walked toward him and said, “You came very near having a brain storm, didn’t you, Brother? Don’t that satisfy you? You know I have trusted you with sixty and seventy thousand dollars at a time in your room overnight, and not once did I question your honesty, then when I started away with this money I only thought I was doing what had been agreed on.”
In both versions of the story, Furey designed a compromise. Spencer had just received a wire from Garrett Thompson confirming the Green Immigration Land Company’s desire to purchase Norfleet’s ranch. Norfleet would accompany Spencer to the express office and collect $30,000, the first installment of the purchase price. Of course, that money would have to be held in a safety-deposit box until Thompson’s attorneys had certified Norfleet’s title to the land, but it would act as earnest money to confirm Thompson’s intentions and would put his mind at ease. Then Spencer would head to Austin for his Liberty Bonds. Norfleet would meet Furey at the Cadillac Hotel in Dallas at ten o’clock the next morning, and together they would redeem the majority of the due bill with the $70,000 cash. This plan mollified the rancher. He and Spencer left for the express office, and Furey left to catch his train—with the money.
The very instant they parted from Norfleet, the swindlers knocked down their sets and wiped off their stage makeup. They fled the theater on the first outbound train while Norfleet was still treading the boards. It wasn’t until the next day, when he arrived at the Cadillac Hotel a half hour early and discovered that Furey had never registered, that he began to wise up. Even then, he waited in the lobby for an hour. He told the clerk to keep a lookout for Furey, then he dashed around to the St. George, the Jefferson, and the Adolphus. He returned to the Cadillac and waited some more, but by then he knew the truth. He’d been had. His last-minute departure from the script meant that the con men had no opportunity to cool him out, so his awakening came fast and hard. He had handed over $45,000 in borrowed money, the equivalent of $560,000 in today’s currency. He owed $90,000 on the Slaughter land, or $1.1 million in contemporary valuation. The game was up, and he was worse than broke.
CHAPTER TWO
Benjamin Franklin’s Disciples
Confidence artistry began one day in May 1849 when a well-dressed young man named Samuel Williams—or was it Samuel Thomas? or William Thompson?—walked up to a stranger on the streets of lower Manhattan and engaged him in a few minutes of intimate small talk. The stranger felt that he knew but couldn’t place this friendly fellow; certainly he seemed like an old friend who was delighted to see him. Williams (as we’ll call him) then asked the stranger, in a disarmingly direct manner, whether or not he had confidence in him. When the man answered yes, the only possible answer in polite conversation, Williams said jovially, “Have you confidence in me to trust me with your watch until to-morrow?” In high humor, his mark handed over his gold watch. And Williams sauntered off into the city, laughing and promising over his shoulder that he’d return the watch the next day. In the span of just a few days in May, he swindled John Deraismes out of a watch valued at $114, John Sturges out of a watch worth $80, and Hugh C. McDonald out of a watch valued at $100.
A few weeks later, Hugh McDonald was walking down Liberty Street when he spotted a familiar figure. He alerted a nearby police officer, and Williams found himself caught by his own mark. He was taken into police custody—though not before he tried to bribe McDonald into dropping the charges. He went before the magistrate, and when it was found that he was “a graduate of the college at Sing Sing,” he was committed to prison to await a trial. The New York Herald broke the story in its Police Intelligence column the next day, and the newspaper immediately recognized that it was witnessing an entirely new genre of criminal enterprise. It was a reporter at the Herald who coined the name “Confidence Man” and who urged New Yorkers to stop by the Tombs for a look at him; then the New-York Tribune and National Police Gazette also picked up the story. Two days later, the Herald reported, “Yesterday, in consequence of the publicity given in the daily journals respecting the arrest of Samuel Williams, the ‘confidence man,’ quite a numerous attendance was brought to the police office, who were all anxious to witness a man who could so far humbug any sensible man.” He was peered at like an animal in a zoo. One visitor from Philadelphia identified him as Edward Stevens, a petty criminal whose first arrest was for stealing a “firkin of lard” and who was known in the underworld as a spotter, a stool pigeon, or a betrayer of confidences. The Herald noted Williams’s reactions to his visitors: “The prisoner, yesterday, at being shown to so many persons, asked if he was a wild beast, and appeared to be much vexed and alarmed at the identifications.” After all, he was far subtler than a pickpocket or
safecracker. He himself described his effect on his marks as “putting them to sleep.”
Nonetheless, he met the fate of a common criminal. After sending a lady friend to attempt to bribe Hugh McDonald a second time, and after being duped by his own bondsman and left to rot in jail, the Confidence Man went before a jury, who handed him a guilty verdict without even leaving their seats. He headed back to his alma mater to serve a two-and-a-half-year sentence. By then, though, a second confidence man by the name of Julius Alexander—or was it Byron Alexander?—was on the prowl.
Williams’s was a remarkably distilled act of trickery, and it seized the public’s imagination. The National Police Gazette crowed loudly at the conviction of “Confidence” but ended its coverage of Williams on a worried note: “We trust this word in time will not be thrown away.” In fact, the very opposite happened, and the term “confidence man” almost instantly entered popular discourse. Two weeks after Williams’s arrest, Burton’s Theatre on Chambers Street in New York presented a farce titled The Confidence Man. Eight years later, in 1857, Williams’s fame was still strong enough that he would have been recognizable as the model for Herman Melville’s protagonist in The Confidence-Man, about an unnamed swindler who roams the decks of a Mississippi steamboat on April Fools’ Day, cheating passengers out of money by disparaging their willingness to trust him. Melville’s confidence man taunts a potential dupe, “What are you? What am I? Nobody knows who anybody is. The data which life furnishes, towards forming a true estimate of any being, are as insufficient to that end as in geometry one side given would be to determine the triangle.” The National Police Gazette formalized the new criminal pastime by defining “confidence man” in its 1859 Rogue’s Lexicon:
