The art of the scam

Rayner's book is the page turner of the two, but both volumes are portraits of indefatigable masters of self-invention who snatched the concept of the Horatio Alger story -- the dream of the endlessly energetic and innovative self-made man -- gave it a pathological skew and then knocked it right out of the park. Hartzell's vision was narrowly focused; he excelled at one-on-one conning or holding forth via letter. He preferred to operate remotely from his headquarters in London, where he owned several homes, kept various women, ordered Savile Row suits 100 at a time and dined every night at the Savoy Hotel. Even on the rare occasions when he returned to the U.S., where he attended public meetings to attract more investors, he let his agents do most of the talking.

Brinkley was his polar opposite. He was expansive, a workaholic. He was certainly the more complex of the two. He was something of a Bible-thumper but also a prewar admirer of Hitler. And yet he was generous and civic-minded; he even charged on a sliding scale for his phony gland operation, so those of modest means could afford to be fleeced. He understood the value of cultivating political connections and threw extravagant parties to which he invited the entire town. He was sort of a populist Ponce de Leon, offering a fountain of youth that he claimed to have discovered in the loins of a goat; his believers were interested in jump-starting their sex lives, or obtaining quick fixes for chronic maladies.

Brinkley's medical credentials were "shaky," and the operation that made him famous -- in which he placed slices of a 3-month-old Toggenberg goat's testis into a human's scrotum -- was, obviously, complete malarkey. Under oath, he admitted that "a 'majority' of the goat glands 'were gradually absorbed' by the patients bodies. 'I don't mean to say the little thing lived,'" Brinkley told the court. (Arghh, I'm not feeling so good all of a sudden.)

Brinkley had his hand in a million endeavors -- some legitimate, some definitely not, but Hartzell had a single story that he told and embellished over and over and over. He was "like a writer of mysteries or thrillers," Rayner says, and he had the true con man's ability to keep breathing life into his story whenever it stumbled or threatened to stall. Every obstacle was transformed into an opportunity. Every broken promise became a plot turn that propelled the tale forward and bought Hartzell more time -- to sell additional shares and to put off the anxious queries of those who'd already invested in his fantasy. He couldn't "tell his donors what they most wanted to hear," Rayner writes, "that the money -- all those billions -- was really on its way [so] he was constantly telling them the next best thing, that it would be coming very, very soon."

If King George V became ill, Hartzell seized the event as explanation for delaying the big payout: The sum that shareholders were about to receive was so enormous that the king had to approve the paperwork personally. When payment was again delayed, Hartzell would explain that "the value of everything to do with the estate of Sir Francis Drake for the last three hundred years had to be calculated and then reassigned -- you could see easily why it might take a lot of time, lawyers, and, therefore, money. If anything was wrong, if any of the seals on the documents were wrong, or any of the ribbons that were held by the seals were not tied right or cut in the right shape, then that could nix the whole deal." And as the ripples of his story spread to encompass most anything that happened on the planet, the amount of the "Drake fortune" itself grew and grew. Hartzell promised his shareholders they would be able to buy entire states, even countries. The settlement was so huge, he said, it would shake the world economy.

Brinkley, who was driven out of Kansas by the AMA and the FRC (Federal Radio Commission, precursor of the FCC) only to reestablish himself in Del Rio, Texas, with one of the country's most powerful radio stations, shared Hartzell's phoenix-like aptitude for turning every dark moment into a new horizon. In the end, though, like Hartzell he crashed and burned. Bankrupt, slain by cancer, he left it to his wife to clean up the financial mess that remained. Both men were that quintessentially American phenomenon: a creature who utterly transforms himself by erasing or largely obscuring his past and assuming a role that catapults him into an entirely different socioeconomic stratosphere.

The successful con man, Rayner writes, relies on two basic rules: "first, there is no seeming limit to the credulity of a greedy sucker once he's been hooked; second, the moment when a game appears to be all done and worn out, utterly exhausted, might just be the moment when it springs to life and gets interesting again. In this the con man is like Scheherazade in 'The Thousand and One Nights,' who understood that a part of us wants a good story never to be over."

This is the point where one is supposed to sagely suggest that, given the events of the go-go '90s and other fiduciary unpleasantness, including the above-mentioned Enron debacle, there is much we can all learn from Rayner and Lee's books about greed, lack of skepticism, ethics and morality. But that would be stupid, annoying and baloney. We read books like these not for a moral lesson, but to be taken along on a high-speed ride without having to pay for the gas. Hartzell and Brinkley were glorious hucksters, enchanting charlatans. These are their stories, so much more fun and colorful than the doings of those bland white-collar thugs in Houston. Put your inner scold on hold and read them with wonder, then call your broker or order some Viagra online.

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