The order had already been issued. From the prison, he was taken to Switzerland’s southeast frontier and handed over to the Italian authorities. They conveyed him to the jail in Trieste, ready to stand trial on the charges that Milania and family had filed.
For just short of a year, Edgar—who bore his captivity with stoicism, enlivened by sparks of skittish humor—was held in Trieste and then Turin while he awaited his next court appearance. At a preliminary hearing, the prosecutor asked, “Have you ever spoken to the contessa about owning fabulous wealth in Canada and having large sums of money deposited in English banks?”
“I cannot answer ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ ” Edgar said, “because when I was with the contessa I was often drunk on the whiskey she made me drink.”
Near the end of the summer of 1926, Edgar received a letter from England, written by the devoted Ethel, who informed him: “We are looking forward every day to your release from prison.” She went on to write:
I enclose two small photographs, one of Leslie and one of me, taken in Blackpool. I wrote to the American consul, asking him to let me have a full account of the case. You must not be sorry if Leslie does not write to you, because he is not even at home for two minutes and spends all his time on his bicycle. But, dear, he always asks about you.
I close here, dear, because there is no other news to give you. All the people in my family say hullo.
With the greatest love and kisses from me and Leslie.
Yours forever,
Ethel
Yet her long-awaited reunion with Edgar could not occur until he’d stood trial in Turin during the fall. His latest spell in the dock generated still more international newspaper coverage and courthouse hilarity. Unlike the previous trial, though, Atta, Georg, and their quivery-voiced stepmother gave evidence against Edgar, who, as one reporter observed, wore a low-key outfit that included “large glasses made of tortoise shell—fake, of course.” The testimony of the Khevenhüller-Metsch family helped to ensure another guilty verdict. It led to a jail sentence of seven years, five months, and fifteen days. With that came a 9,000-lire fine and an order to repay 1,018,657 lire to Milania, though there was scant possibility of Milania ever recouping this substantial amount of money.
Edgar was placed in solitary confinement at the city’s prison. Deprived of an audience for his posturing, depression overwhelmed him. He also fell sick, the poor prison diet hastening his descent into emaciated frailty, yet he mustered the energy to find a new attorney to draft an appeal against his conviction. The attorney, Girolamo Bevinetto, was struck by Edgar’s “truly pitiful state” when the guards escorted him into the interview room for their first meeting. Edgar gave the impression that he’d been abandoned by everyone, so Bevinetto started bringing him food, sending him English and French magazines, and giving him money to buy cigarettes and milk. Other donations soon reached him from Ethel, as well as from the director of the prison, the U.S. consul, the local nunnery, and elsewhere. These consisted of money, along with shoes and warm clothing to fend off the encroaching winter.
Bevinetto drew up an appeal citing nearly a dozen reasons why the verdict of Edgar’s trial should be overturned, or at the very least why the sentence should be reduced. Partnering the appeal was a rambling, floridly archaic statement by Edgar. In this, he pretended that his earlier accounts of his relationship with Milania and Atta were mere “Mother Goose stories.” Quoting a self-penned ode to chivalry, he claimed to have concocted these to spare the contessas’ embarrassment, because they’d hired him as a gigolo and an entertainer. He even had the gall to protest that they still owed him part of the prearranged fee. “Blame me for folly, but not for knavery,” his statement concluded.
Hopeful of overturning the outcome of the trial, Bevinetto submitted the appeal in late December. Edgar then had a worrisome wait for his case to be heard. His life nonetheless improved over the ensuing month and a half. At last removed from solitary confinement, he reverted to playing the role of the gracious benefactor. When another prisoner asked him for a smoke, he took the last of his cigarettes out of his mouth, snapped it in two, and handed half to the man. Edgar also gave away his socks—“I gave them to a guy who needed them.” But altriusm wasn’t what motivated him. As he explained to Bevinetto, “Cotton socks are not suitable for those who are accustomed to silk ones.”
Textiles were soon to become more than just a badge of status for Edgar, who was put to work in the prison’s knitwear shop, where he rapidly learned how to hand-stitch embroidery and operate a weaving machine. His minuscule income from that work averaged less than a lire a day.
He wasn’t short of cash, though, due to a generous monetary gift from one of his female fans, which must have contributed to his cheerful disposition the next time Bevinetto visited him. The gift came from an aristocratic Belgian writer, who believed in Edgar’s self-proclaimed cause as an Indian rights campaigner. Half the money was credited to him at the prison commissary and the other half went toward the cost of having a daily lunch brought in from a local restaurant. His Belgian benefactress also offered him a job as her chauffeur, secretary, or bodyguard when he was released from jail. But he declined her offer because he wasn’t, as he informed her, certain what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.
The court of appeal’s examination of his case would go a long way toward clarifying his immediate future. All over Europe there was press coverage of what one leading Italian newspaper billed as this “latest episode in the now-famous courtroom comic drama.” With lip-smacking relish, the front page of Paris-soir led with THE RISE AND FALL OF WHITE ELK. And another French newspaper ran a story claiming that Edgar was a Frenchman from the working-class Parisian suburb of Belleville.
Both the court’s original verdict and the sentence ended up being upheld by the presiding judges. On the assumption that “no one in this world is completely normal,” their ruling spurned the notion that Edgar’s abnormal psychology was a mitigating factor in his crimes.
His personality had, however, come to fascinate the attorney who represented him during the appeal process. Bevinetto afterward dashed off a short and sympathetic book about Edgar’s dealings with the Khevenhüller-Metsch family. Entitled Le Avventure di Edgardo Laplante (The Adventures of Edgar Laplante), it was released in a small edition by an obscure Italian imprint. Bevinetto’s book hailed him the “con man supreme.”
Across the Atlantic, where references to Edgar had long since evaporated from the newspapers, a fellow con man and pale-skinned publicity hound by the name of Charles Smith obtained inspiration from his shenanigans. Smith posed first as the son of Chief White Elk and then as the chief himself. Over a five-month period, this counterfeit of a counterfeit fronted promotional events at Californian car dealerships, addressed schoolchildren about Indian tradition, and crowed to the press about his power to influence sports contests by performing ritual dances. He also grabbed his own sliver of notoriety by getting himself picked up as a suspect in the murder of a twenty-year-old woman, later identified as a typhoid victim.
Edgar was meanwhile transferred to Civitavecchia prison, only a short distance from Rome. Broke once again, he was reduced to paying for cigarettes by selling the gold crowns on several of his teeth.
Good behavior earned him parole just two and a half years into his sentence. But the Italian fascist regime, which had lately completed its evolution into a dictatorship, branded him “a dangerous character” and refused to release him until he could be repatriated at his own expense. Edgar was probably behind the failed bid to persuade his father—whom he hadn’t seen for fifteen years—to put up the $118 fare home.
He had to endure another two months at Civitavecchia until the local U.S. consul secured employment for him as a mess steward on the SS Executive, an American cargo vessel, scheduled to steam from Genoa to New York City in mid-August 1929. Before that, Edgar was moved to Le Nuove prison in Turin, where he shared a cell with the nineteen-year-old anti-fascist Massimo Mila, who would go on to become an eminent music critic.
In readiness for the SS Executive’s departure, the Italian authorities then moved Edgar to Genoa, a city he’d last visited during his triumphal tour of the country. He was turned loose from prison only just prior to embarkation, at which point he exchanged his jail uniform for the uniform of a mess steward. Dapper though he looked in his latest costume, made up of a white mess jacket, matching shirt, dark trousers, and wavily striped necktie, his once-photogenic features bore the heavy boot print of life in jail. His skin had grown coarse, his mouth was bracketed by deep grooves, and his teeth were badly discolored and punctuated by gaps. Only his hair, which he wore in a fashionable greased-back style, remained unaltered, still dark and dense.
American and Italian journalists seized the opportunity to quiz him before he departed. He told the Italians that prison had transformed his personality, revived his love of hard work, and cured him of what he called his two vices—alcohol and morphine. Any mention of his parallel cocaine addiction was omitted.
When Edgar spoke with a representative from the Associated Press, he announced that he bore no ill feeling toward the country where he had been imprisoned for so long. His comments, together with reports of his imminent homeward voyage, were carried by numerous American newspapers. At least Edgar had the consolation of knowing he hadn’t been forgotten.