The art of the scam

Two great American con men bilked their fellow citizens of millions by peddling goat gonad cures for impotence and shares in the estate of Sir Francis Drake.

By Douglas Cruickshank

May 6, 2002 | If to hustle is human and to con divine, the art of the extended con must have reached the ne plus ultra of its divinity in the U.S. in the 1920s and '30s, when oily operators like Oscar Hartzell and John R. Brinkley were pulling down staggering fortunes by filling people's hearts with hope and their heads with hooey. Both Hartzell and Brinkley are long gone, but wait! -- they live again in two new books that trace their crooked, dazzling trajectories. The first and best of the two is "Drake's Fortune: The Fabulous True Story of The World's Greatest Confidence Man," a biography of Oscar Hartzell by Richard Rayner. The second is R. Alton Lee's "The Bizarre Careers of John R. Brinkley."

Lee doesn't have the narrative chops of Rayner, who also wrote the novel "The Cloud Sketcher," but Lee's subject, the insatiably ambitious quack known as the "goat gland doctor," who claimed he could restore sexual prowess to impotent men, takes the Most Bent Personality trophy. It's a tough call, though -- Hartzell was a kaleidoscopic sociopath of no small accomplishment. Both men were preternaturally buoyant, apparently put on earth to prove that you can't keep a bad man down. Either would have felt at home in Enron's executive meetings.

Enron notwithstanding, when it comes to big-time grifters, Hartzell and Brinkley's days were golden ones for career scam artists. Like the 1990s, the anything-goes roar of the '20s heralded a decade in which the fantasy of fast living and free spending ignited the public's imagination even if the reality eluded most. That era ended with the catastrophic financial collapse of 1929, followed by the Great Depression, a considerably more dire situation than our current not so great depression, er, recession. It was a time that found many people in desperate straits, to put it mildly.

Oscar Hartzell intuitively grokked his times. His grand ruse was this: He sold shares in the incorrectly probated estate of Sir Francis Drake, the 16th century privateer, British admiral and plunderer of the Spanish Armada, who became fabulously wealthy on the gold, silver, jewels and other treasure he seized from Spain's ships. Over nearly two decades, Hartzell made millions by promising a piece of the action to those who gave him money to help untangle long unresolved legal issues around the Drake estate. Once settled, the estate would total in the hundreds of billions, he promised, maybe more.

As early as April 1924, Hartzell, a Midwesterner who operated out of London while running his con through agents in the U.S., was receiving a monthly payment of $2,250 by wire at the American Express office, which he treated like his personal club. By September of 1926 he was collecting $8,000 a month -- more than $80,000 in 2002 dollars -- and he tirelessly prodded his investors in Iowa to send more. His urgent wires, Rayner writes, "fizzed with self-importance and conviction. He preached. He commanded. His tone of authority impelled his readers to believe that he was indeed dealing with the 'highest powers that be,' the 'King's and Lords' Commission,' and the 'Ecclesiastical Courts.'"

Needless to say, there was no such thing as a "King's and Lords' Commission," the estate had been settled centuries earlier and none of Hartzell's 70,000 or more shareholders ever saw so much as a doubloon. But apparently his story, and his delivery, was so compelling, his game so engaging, that at the end of his life it was playing him. By the time he died, at age 67 in 1943, in a hospital for the criminally insane, Hartzell believed that he was Sir Francis Drake.

Brinkley's very different con was the promise of a revitalized sex life. His bogus "virility rejuvenation cure -- transplanting goat gonads into aging men" enabled him to build a pre-Depression empire that continued to flourish through the 1930s and included his own hospitals, radio stations, oil wells, commercial real estate, a Lockheed Electra airplane, yachts, lavish homes and a run for governor of Kansas that some say he would have won if not for voting fraud. Says Lee, "From Hrycus the He-Goat of the Renaissance, who was always 'burning for coitus,' to the development in 1998 of Viagra, a pill to reduce male impotency, aging men have sought remedies for the inexorable decline of their virility ... As Brinkley discovered, more often than not men are happy to pay." And pay they did. By 1929 Brinkley's annual income -- derived from prescriptions he gave after diagnosing patients over the air on his radio station and the 50 operations per week he claimed to be performing -- was between $1.9 million and $2.2 million ($19 million to $22 million in 2002 dollars).

Rayner also wrote "The Blue Suit," a memoir recalling his life as a thief during the years he attended Cambridge University, and his own father was a con man who sold cars he didn't own and then disappeared to South Africa. Rayner's résumé gives him a palpable connection to his subject -- he seems to regard Hartzell with a mix of contempt and admiration, and so do we. Both Rayner and Lee's books hit the same sweet spot as movies like "The Sting," "The Grifters" and maybe "The Thomas Crown Affair" do. The wicked cleverness of Hartzell's and Brinkley's stories, their ability to get something for nothing by turning the capitalist trick a few twists farther than most are willing to, makes us day job louts envious -- not that we're proud of it, mind you.

Next Page: The ol' "goat slices in the scrotum" trick

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