Cheaters Sometimes Prosper After a life of scams, wild reversals and arrests, Rice dedicated his memoir to ‘the American Sucker.’ By Edward Chancellor
http://www.wsj.com/articles/cheaters-sometimes-prosper-1451513912
America was born a land of speculators and opportunists. People have constantly moved across its great land mass in pursuit of the better life. But there’s a catch. A country of drifters and dreamers has provided rich pickings for grifters and con men. Not surprisingly, they crop up in countless American novels, plays and films, from Melville’s 1857 “The Confidence-Man” to “The Sting” (1973), a movie that was set in the 1930s, toward the end of what T.D. Thornton calls the “golden age of the con artist.” With “My Adventures With Your Money,” Mr. Thornton offers up a hugely entertaining biography of one such “artist.”
In an essay called “Diddling,” Edgar Allan Poe described confidence man as a “compound of which the ingredients are minuteness, interest, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, nonchalance, originality, impertinence, and grin.” George Graham Rice, the anti-hero of Mr. Thornton’s book, had an abundance of “grin,” or what a later age would call chutzpah. A 1934 profile of him by the journalist A.J. Liebling described him as “contagiously optimistic,” with a “phosphorescent smile.” The title of Mr. Thorton’s book-length profile is taken from Rice’s own 1913 memoir, originally dedicated in a memorable way: “To the American Damphool Speculator, surnamed the American Sucker, otherwise described herein as The Thinker Who Thinks He Knows But Doesn’t—greetings! This book is for you! Read as you run, and may you run as you read.”
My Adventures With Your Money
By T.D. Thornton
St. Martin’s, 320 pages, $27.99
Jacob Herzig was born in 1870, the son of well-to-do Jewish immigrants in New York’s Lower East Side. As a young man, he stole money from the family’s furrier business. Sent to a reformatory, he befriended an elderly con, Willie Graham Rice, whose name he appropriated. For the next 40 years, his life was a whir of scams, fortunes quickly made and lost, and run-ins with the authorities.
Estranged from his family, Rice found himself, in the spring of 1901, short of money in New York. An acquaintance gave him a tip for a dead cert in an upcoming race. Rather than betting on the horse, he spent his last dollars advertising the tip in the papers. The horse came in, and Rice’s race-tipping service, Maxim & Gay, was born. Within a year, the firm was said to have earned $1 million. Rice started a racing paper, developed a large client database (aka the “sucker list”) and opened a mail-order betting service. The service tipped winners in fixed races and heavily advertised its successes by using, in Mr. Thornton’s words, “insider terminology and a cloak of secrecy to forge a compelling narrative.”
Good times didn’t last. Within a couple of years, the feds had cracked down and the paper folded. Broke again, Rice headed out West, to the prospecting towns of Nevada, where he discovered the industry’s maxim: There are easier ways to acquire gold than by digging for it. He touted mining companies and established a brokerage to sell penny mining stocks to the masses. The trick was to make worthless mining properties alluring by bribing mine engineers, among them Rice’s own brother Charles, to talk up their prospects and by generating publicity with newspaper articles and stunts, including arranging a boxing match with what was to that date the largest prize in history—a bout that was, needless to say, fixed.
When that business failed, Rice returned to New York to set up on the notorious Curb Exchange, the unregulated outdoor market where just about anything could change hands, from usurious loans to bribes for public officials. He opened a bucket shop—so called because orders were not properly executed on an exchange but placed “in the bucket”—and later partnered with Arnold Rothstein, reputed to be America’s first organized-crime boss. “The two equated money with power, honesty with weakness, and found ‘straight’ people dull,” writes Mr. Thornton.
Rice’s scamming career yielded moments of great wealth, but the wheel of fortune never stopped turning. Like many cons, Rice had a weakness for gambling. Besides, any success soon attracted the attention of the authorities. Mr. Thornton describes the pursuit of Rice by a determined New York prosecutor as resembling a game of Whac-A-Mole. No sooner was Rice knocked down than he cropped up somewhere else with a new plan.
“My Adventures With Your Money” is written in a fast-paced and jaunty style, as befits the subject, whose own self-serving memoirs are quoted copiously. Yet Mr. Thornton also has a sharp eye for detail—when the cops swoop in on Rice’s brokerage, the pickpockets on Broad Street enjoy “a bonanza spree pilfering billfolds and pocket watches from the distracted masses.” The Jazz Age is wonderfully conjured up with its numerous crazes and dubious promotions, from “extracting gold from seawater . . . [to] devising a ‘spirit laboratory’ to consult dead inventors.”
A couple of weeks after the October 1929 crash, Rice was sent to jail yet again—this time for four years—where he ended up sharing a cell with Al Capone. At the time of his conviction, he yelled defiantly: “I’ll show you all! I’ll come back!” But time was catching up with the old rogue. The Depression brought down the curtain on the golden age of the big con—in straitened times the public was less credulous and, as the age of Big Government arrived, the authorities became more vigilant and somewhat less corrupt. That doesn’t mean, of course, that scamming ended. Just check your junk mail. But the aristocrat of grifters, the confidence man, became an endangered species. “My Adventures With Your Money” is a grand addition to the grifting genre. Pick your own pocket and buy a copy.
—Mr. Chancellor is the author of “Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation.”
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