Con men and swindlers are as much a part of American lore as pioneers and prospectors.
As the country grew, they followed the railways and preyed on frontier optimism, constantly inventing new ways to make a buck.
These five cunning historical scams show just how enterprising — and gullible — people can be.
Three-Card Monte
Three-card monte has been duping suckers for hundreds of years. Yet, people continue to fall prey to one of the oldest cons in the books; old-timers still deal on New York streets. It works like this: Dealers put cards face down on a box, shuffle them around, and place bets on which is the queen.
They may allow a few wins before upping the ante and hustling the victim out of his wager, with the help of conspirators. “There is something tantalizing about losing money at three-card monte, something that sets men’s teeth on edge,” says a 1929 pioneer history on Ancestry.
“It seems so simple to be able to turn the right card out of three, and yet, thanks to the gambler, it is seldom done; never when he wills otherwise.”
The “Dollar Store”
In the 1880 census, Benjamin Marks listed his occupation as “gambler.” That was true enough, but it obscures the many guises of his trade, including card shark, horse-track bettor, and casino owner. But he earned a place in history books for apparently inventing the idea of a crooked “Dollar Store.”
This frontier town fixture posed as a typical shop, yet no one bought anything. Rather, they were tempted into the back for a little hand of cards: three-card monte games. While most dealers set up tables on the street, Marks and his descendants had actual storefronts.
Starting in Cheyenne, Wyoming, he moved to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where he established a legal casino in town and hosted card games (and prostitutes) in his riverside home. Investigators later counted millions of dollars of ill-gotten gains.
The Stock Broker
Joseph “Yellow Kid” Weil was an underworld celebrity in the first decades of the 20th Century.
Historical newspapers on Ancestry are filled with colorful tales of the “silver-tongued” Weil, “king of confidence men.”
Based in Chicago, he allegedly frisked investors of some $10 million during his long career. He operated phony brokerages, forged checks, sent letters on counterfeit J.P. Morgan stationery, and rigged the betting markets.
He was an equal-opportunity con, fleecing country farmers and urbanites alike, but bankers were his preferred mark. During World War I, he talked one Indiana banker into investing $100,000 in fake shares of a local steel mill. Weil lived to be 100, leading newspapers to ponder the link between dishonesty and longevity.
The Wallet Drop
The U.S. Album of Criminals, published in 1906, lists William Mead (above) as card shark and grafter on Pullman sleepers. But Mead was only 29 then, and his greatest cons were still to come.
J. Edgar Hoover later called him one of the country’s shrewdest confidence men. Mead is credited with inventing the wallet drop swindle, a trick when a con man “loses” his wallet and walks away with the victim’s cash.
Its many permutations continue today. In the 1920s and 1930s, he and his accomplices traveled the country and scored millions of dollars this way. When the Feds started investigating one of his victims, Mead hired a plastic surgeon to mutilate his fingertips. Ironically, that maneuver is itself a crime, and led to Mead’s imprisonment.
The Wire Tap
In the 1973 movie “The Sting,” the Paul Newman and Robert Redford characters set up an elaborate, and fake, off-track betting parlor. The scam is based on ones that flourished in the early 20th century, when crooks cut telegraph wires to delay the report of race results; in the interim, accomplices could place last-minutes bets on what they knew to be the winner.
Or they’d tap the wire to relay falsified race results. Sometimes, crooks would dupe other crooks by getting them to invest in a purportedly sure-fire con. Charles Gondorf, whom newspapers called “the king of wiretappers,” operated a notorious East Coast ring with his brother Fred, the basis for the Newman and Redford duo.
Was your ancestor a mark or a con? Explore your family history on Ancestry!