Edgar’s continued munificence left him so short of cash that he could only afford to dispense tips amounting to ten lire or less. These did little to buttress either his references to his own wealth or his airy talk of the extravagant gifts he aimed to bestow.
People began to wonder whether he was suffering from some form of mental illness alongside his physical ailments. In a sign that the symptoms of those ailments were fading, Edgar’s libido reasserted itself. When he propositioned a male nurse who strayed into his room, the nurse was disgusted. But even that setback failed to diminish his belief in his powers of persuasion.
Shortage of money encouraged him to write a begging letter to Milania, the letter inevitably giving away his whereabouts. He stressed that Milania shouldn’t worry about the loans he was set to repay her next month, and that everyone would be happy in the end. As the prelude to him seeking an emergency loan, he also dished up a catalog of excuses.
In previous months his request would have precipitated a bank transfer, but this time it triggered a visit from Atta, who showed up a week after his admission to Bellinzona’s hospital. She was in an exceptionally agitated state, apparently handing back her engagement ring.
Her arrival overlapped with a visit from a left-wing attorney named Mario Ferri. Edgar appears to have engaged Ferri’s professional services in order to lend substance to his long-running yarn about being embroiled in a legal dispute with the British government. Daunted by his tales of being related to the Bourbon dynasty and owning a large property in Fiumicello, as well as oil wells and extensive land in Canada, Ferri addressed him with groveling courtesy as “Your Most Serene Royal Highness.”
To quell Milania and Atta’s growing fretfulness about the money owed their family, Edgar composed a note to the governor-general, Britain’s senior representative in Canada. His note sustained the conceit that the British colonial authorities were denying him access to his own money. But there was a slight snag. He didn’t know the governor-general’s name. Plucking a name from his imagination, he called the governor-general “Mr. Larkin,” this seeming familiarity with such a high-ranking official emphasizing just how well-connected he was.
“I hereby authorize the Contessa Khevenhüller-Metsch to handle my affairs, for I am sick and unable to come in person,” he wrote. “And I hope to get justice as a Canadian.” He signed the note, “Chief White Elk.” When he handed it to Atta, he must have known it would secure him nothing more than temporary remission.
Atta still felt sympathetic enough toward him to foot his medical bill, yet her suspicions about him had grown dramatically. Unnerved by the situation, she left Bellinzona right away and started out for London, where she could find out about his estranged wife and talk to people responsible for Britain’s dealings with Canada and its governor-general. The journey would take a minimum of three days, on top of which another week or two would be required to arrange the necessary appointments. By the early part of January 1925, she was bound to obtain incontrovertible proof that Edgar had swindled her family.
Edgar’s plan was well-advanced. Likely utilizing Mario Ferri’s legal know-how, he hoped to escape the consequences of his fraud by obtaining citizenship from the microstate of San Marino, just over sixty miles to the east of Florence. With his intended departure looming, he met Milania in Bellinzona on Christmas Eve—four days after his encounter with her stepdaughter.
Over lunch he capitalized on Atta’s absence by soft-soaping Milania into lending him about twenty-five thousand lire. When he introduced Milania to Dr. Sacchi, the hospital’s director, he referred to her as his aunt. In awe of Edgar, Sacchi invited them both to dinner at his home that evening.
Sacchi’s attitude toward Edgar would have been very different if he’d had access to that morning’s edition of one of Belgium’s most prominent newspapers. Dominating its front page was a less-than-reverential cartoon about Edgar. It depicted three young girls, one of whom gestured toward another and said, “Look at the fun she’s having—and she hasn’t even seen White Elk.”
There was barely time for Edgar to sleep off the aftereffects of the dinner party before his departure for Lugano, hometown of Mario Ferri, who had recommended the city to him. An eighteen-mile ride on the St. Gotthard railroad, featuring sharp grades and a passing cavalcade of alpine peaks and car-free valleys, provided the easiest means of taking up Mario’s suggestion. Perched upon the rim of an expansive lake typically swarming with motorboats, steamers, and rowboats, Lugano was cradled by forested mountains, their lower slopes sheathed in vineyards and gardens. Its tightly packed buildings, arcades, and granite-paved streets, where horse-drawn carriages coexisted with streetcars, felt as if they belonged to an Italian city. Enhancing this was the sound of Italian on the sidewalks, and the presence of many refugees from Mussolini’s government, which had against all odds weathered the Matteotti scandal. If Il Duce could get away with murdering a key political opponent, then maybe Edgar could also evade justice.
Edgar took over a plush suite at the Hotel Centrale, from where he made repeated forays around the city. In the window of a tobacco store, he caught sight of a display of foreign cigarette packs bearing the head of a Native American. He went in and bought several packs from the woman who ran the store. They had, he informed her, been manufactured at a plant he owned in the United States. And he got talking with other people to whom he said he meant to purchase one of the local hotels or even a castle.
His billfold shrinking with familiar speed, he felt the need to scam Milania out of some more money before her stepdaughter alerted her. “We should be happy, because I understand from Atta that everything is going well in England,” his deceitful letter to Milania announced. He explained that the British government had confirmed they’d be releasing all his assets, this imminent bonanza offering security against whatever Milania lent him.
She was then duped into coughing up an additional eighteen thousand lire. Edgar converted it into large bags of one-franc Swiss coins. He carried these with him on regular strolls along the quayside, which grew busy during the evenings when the streetlamps illuminated the lakefront. With ostentatious bravado, he skimmed coins across the surface of the water. Eventually tiring of that, he gave handfuls of them to aging strangers.
Among the people he buttonholed was a long-faced fifty-six-year-old woman with dark, curly hair. When he tried to hand her a five-franc piece, she looked surprised and refused it. She turned out to be Princess Victoria, the waspish, unmarried sister of King George V of England.
Despite Edgar’s habit of flaunting the ring he’d been given by a Florentine admirer—the ring that he liked to say Il Duce had presented to him—Mario Ferri took him to the Red Ball, the local socialist party’s New Year’s Eve shindig. Edgar had on his full getup, along with the dagger donated by Mussolini’s Musketeers. Sensibly, he’d removed the fascist insignia beforehand, though that didn’t deter several of the other guests from criticizing Mario for inviting such a well-known supporter of the Italian fascist regime.
Inside forty-eight hours of the Red Ball, Edgar seems to have been broke again. Compounding his problems was the news that he hadn’t obtained the San Marino citizenship he’d been counting on.
Under the pretext that he couldn’t access his bank account due to the public holiday, Edgar sponged four hundred Swiss francs from the owner of the hotel where he was staying. Another two hundred came from Mario. But these borrowings fell way short of the cost of the boozy banquet he laid on for a couple of hundred freeloaders, who wound up smashing glasses, bottles, and dishes.
With his hotel bill and other debts still outstanding, he appears to have used a hired car to skip town, not before telling his admirers that he’d been summoned back to America, where he was planning to sell some of his oil wells. His creditors must have been embarrassed about being fleeced by him, because the majority of them never reported him to the police.
Early in the first week of 1925, he returned to Bellinzona, checked in to the Hotel Metropole, and swiftly renewed his friendship with Dr. Sacchi. In addition to being the director of the city’s hospital, Sacchi was the president of Bellinzona Municipal Council. Falling for Edgar’s showy talk about how he’d like to fund the construction of a new hospital, Sacchi invited Edgar to use the Municipal Council’s private box at the theater that Wednesday evening.
The invitation led Edgar to pay someone to paste red STOP PRESS strips onto the posters advertising the show, which featured the Maieroni Theater Company. “This evening His Excellency Tewanna will honor the artiste Maieroni by attending the show wearing his ornate national costume,” the announcements declared.
Sacchi was not alone in succumbing to Edgar’s charm. It also captivated a local woman who ran a hairdressing business. She soon developed a crush on him. Persuaded that he hadn’t budgeted for the cost of visiting the country’s central region, she withdrew 250 Swiss francs from her savings and lent this to him. Edgar said he’d repay her in just a few days, the promise of 1,000 francs interest yielding a potent incentive.
On the evening of the show, he hired a carriage that enabled him to make a grand entrance to the similarly grand nineteenth-century Teatro Sociale, which had attracted a sellout crowd. He was initially refused entry to the Municipal Council’s private box. When the theater staff at last permitted him to enter the wooden cubicle, one of many such cubicles that formed a horseshoe arrangement around the stage, his feathered headdress and the rest of his ensemble snagged people’s attention. The audience acknowledged him with a standing ovation.
“Atta is such a nice girl,” Milania wrote on January 4, 1925. “She will help you and I am sure she will sort out everything for you.”
Edgar was, however, under no illusion that Atta’s trip to England would do anything except deepen his problems. These were multiplying despite his triumphant evening at the theater. It gave rise to an article in the local press, questioning his regal status. Many people defended him and were angry that such disrespect should be shown to a foreign dignitary, yet he chose that moment to make his surreptitious exit. He left behind the familiar compendium of unpaid loans and bills.
In his hotel room, he also left some of the charity-seeking letters he’d received. But he wasn’t prepared to relinquish the bulk of his trophies. Crammed into his suitcases was a chaotic collection of paperwork. He kept some two thousand letters. He kept newspaper stories about himself. He kept posters advertising shows held in his honor. He kept official invitations. He kept PNF membership cards. He kept letters from Milania and Atta and other female admirers, among them Alda Borelli, one of the most famous Italian stage actresses of that era. He kept numerous photos, now arrayed in a leather-bound volume decorated with an embossed image of Dante and Beatrice. He even kept a copy of a satirical magazine that had made fun of him.
Journeying out of the Italian-speaking section of Switzerland, he made brief stops in Bern and Lausanne. On Friday, January 9, 1925, he breezed into the city of Neuchâtel. More than a hundred miles from Bellinzona, it faced a large lake. Neuchâtel’s often quaint streets, which played host to European students of all ages, marched away from its long, tree-lined quayside and then up a steep gradient, capped by a church and a castle.
Now that he was in Switzerland’s Francophone region, Edgar had no difficulty communicating with people. As Prince Tewanna Ray, he registered at the fifty-room Grand Hôtel du Lac, a starchy, midtown establishment looking onto the docks and the lake beyond. He told the owner that he was the holder of a diplomatic passport, that the local police had been ordered to protect him, and that his Canadian assets were worth millions of dollars. Alcoholism as well as drug addiction doing nothing to sustain his once-unerring facilities as a smooth talker, Edgar’s self-important blather merely succeeded in arousing the hotelier’s distrust. The subsequent behavior of the supposed Canadian prince only intensified that.
Each day Edgar made a point of having at least one and three-quarter pints of cognac sent up to his room. He got into a row with a boy—probably a bellhop—who worked there. He likely availed himself of the surfeit of cocaine that had long been on the streets of Neuchâtel. And he began flirting with the waiter assigned to serve him in the hotel restaurant. Not such a good idea. For a start, it risked antagonizing the hotelier and maybe even drawing the attention of the police, since male homosexual liaisons were against the law in Switzerland.
Between his arrival in Neuchâtel and the next morning, Edgar was welcomed by a half-dozen university students. With generosity in keeping with the man he pretended to be, he invited them to lunch at his hotel, where he furnished them with gifts (one of which appears to have been the ceremonial dagger he received from Mussolini’s Musketeers). During the meal, he and his guests downed six bottles of champagne, the full cost of the party added to Edgar’s tab.
Sad and disenchanted, Atta rolled up in Bellinzona that day, intent on confronting Edgar, who had already decamped to Neuchâtel. In the twenty-one days since their last meeting, she’d discovered that his Canadian oil wells were as fictional as his Bourbon ancestry. She had also visited the Manchester address to which she’d written the previous summer. There, she’d met his wife and stepson, the two women striking up an improbable friendship, borne out of their shared ordeal. Her attitude toward Edgar transformed, Atta now regarded him as “a madman and a con man.” From England, she had wired her stepmother about the results of her investigation. NOTHING GOOD, her wire proclaimed. HE MUST BE ARRESTED.
Milania refused to go to the police and acknowledge her foolishness in falling for Edgar’s preposterous stories, her sense of shame enabling him to carry on hustling the citizens of Neuchâtel. He passed the next three days borrowing money, seducing women, and drinking heavily to compensate for his inability to obtain cocaine or morphine. He also insinuated himself into the city’s Italian community.
Twice within that short space of time, he attended meetings of the local Italian Circle, each time making a speech. He pledged to donate twenty-five thousand lire to assist impoverished members of their community. Yielding to the effects of having more cognac than hemoglobin in his circulatory system, one of his speeches lurched into embarrassing incoherence.
His reputation in Neuchâtel was not helped by his behavior at the Grand Hôtel du Lac. Besides unsuccessfully propositioning a member of the staff, he succeeded in luring up to his bedroom the waiter with whom he’d been flirting.
Increasingly censorious of Edgar, whose seduction of the waiter scandalized the other staff, that Tuesday the hotel’s owner presented him with a bill totaling three hundred Swiss francs. As Edgar had no means of paying, the owner threw him out and confiscated his treasured souvenirs and the rest of his luggage, even the bulk of his ostensibly valuable Native American costume. Other than his feathered headdress, which he managed to take with him, Edgar retained nothing but the warm, far-from-exotic clothes he had on: a thick shirt and matching tie, plus a tweed jacket and a pale homburg with a dark band around it. In defiance of his dire situation, he wore the homburg at a jaunty angle that concealed his mussed hair but failed to distract from the shadows under his tired-looking eyes.
Weak and malnourished after several days during which he had evidently prioritized alcohol over food, he traipsed through the city in search of accommodation. He tried somewhere cheaper—the cumbersomely named Hôtel des Alpes and Terminus, situated beside the train station. But when the hotelier saw that he possessed neither luggage nor money, he was given just five minutes to leave the premises.
If Edgar thought the situation couldn’t get any worse, then he was in for a nasty surprise. At the insistence of her stepson, Milania had been persuaded to press charges against him. Edgar was also the subject of a complaint to the Neuchâtel police by the owner of the Grand Hôtel du Lac. The police responded by wiring their counterparts in Ticino, the region within which Bellinzona was located. From Ticino, they received word that the “prince” had already been the subject of unfavorable reports about his “questionable morals.”
Later that day, Edgar knocked on the door of the hospital run by the Catholic Brothers of Providence, though he and providence were no longer on speaking terms. He was not only seeking sanctuary but also probably hoping the doctors would take pity on him and give him a series of cocaine and morphine injections. Without those, he’d continue to suffer the menu of withdrawal symptoms from which he was being treated to a five-course banquet. Stomach cramps, fatigue, sweating, nausea, anxiety, vomiting, and nightmares were just a few of its constituent delicacies.
Once he’d been admitted to the hospital, he somehow got his hands on enough cognac to offer him a route to either alcoholic oblivion or suicide. While he was holed up that evening, the Ticino police issued a warrant against him on fraud charges. Their equivalents in Neuchâtel promptly launched a search for him.
Accompanied by the commissioners of both police departments, the search party found him at the hospital shortly after midnight on Wednesday, January 14, 1925. He looked very surprised when he saw them, yet his expression of astonishment faded quickly. He must have known he’d finally landed in a jam from which no amount of talking could extricate him.
“The comedy’s over,” he said as the police arrested him. They led him out of the hospital and into the midwinter darkness. Except for his feathered headdress, a droopy memento of happier times, he had nothing with him, not even a few coins left over from the huge sums of money that had slithered through his fingers like one of the imaginary trout in his imaginary kingdom.