5
The Scam Manifesto
When the first settlers arrived off the shore of the territory of Poyais in February 1823, they already had a very clear idea of what to expect from their new home. As the Honduras Packet dropped its anchor just outside the Black River lagoon, the colonists aboard must have been eagerly anticipating the wealth that awaited them in their new life. The land of Poyais was both beautiful and fertile, they knew. Its warm Central American climate was a far cry from the wintry London they’d left, two months earlier, and was said to do wonders for the health. Its rich soils could grow three crops a year, promising any enterprising farmer a ready fortune for minimal effort. The country’s long, winding rivers ran full of gold, small nuggets of it obtainable to any passerby simply by sifting the fine sands. Inside that lagoon lay the mouth of the Black River, home to the country’s major trading port, and but a few miles distant was the capital city of Saint Joseph—a small but growing metropolis of fifteen hundred souls, with elegant architecture after the European fashion.
No boat yet having emerged from the lagoon to greet their new fellow countrymen, Captain Hedgcock fired one of the ship’s cannons to alert the Poyers (as the citizens of Poyais were known) to their arrival. They waited excitedly for the harbor’s representatives to row out and receive them.
And waited. And then waited some more.
Hmm. Still no boat.
The boat never emerged because, as the settlers discovered when they finally decided to go ashore by themselves, inside the lagoon there was no bustling trading port. When they searched for the capital, Saint Joseph, venturing miles up the river and cutting their way through the dense jungle, they didn’t find a cosmopolitan city with wide boulevards, a bank and an opera house. Instead, they found some rubble and a few ruined huts that had been abandoned the previous century. Assuming that they must have landed at the wrong place, they checked against a detailed map of the nation, one which they had been given by the Cazique of Poyais himself: the war hero, descendant of nobility and inspirational ruler of this young country, General Sir Gregor MacGregor.
Nope. They were definitely in the right place.
The thing that the settlers hadn’t quite deduced, at this stage—but which, perhaps, some were already feeling the initial stirrings of, down in that bit of the stomach that first realizes when you’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake—was that the reason there were no boats, and the reason there was no port and no capital city, wasn’t because they’d been given bad directions.
It was, of course, because there’s no such country as Poyais. This entire young nation existed almost exclusively in the mind of Gregor MacGregor, a man who somehow leveraged his fictional dominion to raise a fortune from investors in London, and who convinced hundreds of his fellow Scots to sell their worldly possessions, abandon their homes and cross an ocean (all while paying him handsomely for the privilege of a new life).
Within a year, most of them would be dead.
Some con artists work their grift by inventing imaginary businesses, or sick relatives or mysterious fortunes that can only be recovered with the assistance of a randomly emailed stranger. These people are like little babies compared to MacGregor, who invented an entire country.
We’re kind of obsessed with con artists, swindlers, grifters and scammers of all sorts. Whether we see them as cruel exploiters of the vulnerable and gullible, or as having a perverse folk-hero status—turning unfair systems back on themselves—we can’t get enough of them. That could be because we enjoy the schadenfreude of seeing others getting fooled, or because we revel in the paranoid fear that we could get tricked ourselves. Or it could be because of the way they seem to confirm what many of us secretly think about the social structures that separate the haves from the have-nots—that they’re all phony, hollow facades that any of us could break down, if only we had the chutzpah to pretend to be something we’re not.
MacGregor is now remembered by history as having orchestrated what the Economist once described as “the greatest confidence trick of all time.”101 But what’s fascinating about him is that, to this day, it’s still not entirely clear quite how much was real, how much was a very deliberate con and how much was simply self-delusion on the grandest of scales.
Ambitious, charismatic and at least provisionally charming, MacGregor was a man who felt very profoundly that he was destined for greatness. What’s more, he consistently managed to maneuver himself tantalizingly close to that greatness...only to promptly drive his career off a cliff every time. To put it bluntly, if MacGregor had only put the same amount of effort into actually achieving things as he did into pretending that he’d achieved them, then he (not to mention several hundred impoverished or dead settlers) would have been a lot better off.
It’s possible to understand why the settlers and investors who fell for MacGregor’s scheme did so. He boasted a truly impressive pedigree: a Scottish noble who was a veteran of the British army, he had served with the legendary Fifty-Seventh Regiment of Foot—the “Die Hards”—at the Battle of Albuera. He had also fought in the Portuguese army and had been made a knight of the Order of Christ by Portugal in return for his service. Then, as many British military men of the time did, he traveled to Latin America to fight in their wars of liberation against the Spanish empire, becoming a general in the Venezuelan army and a hero to its people. Perhaps all this wasn’t surprising—after all, he was the chief of the Clan Gregor, a descendant of the legendary Rob Roy himself.
Then ads began to appear in the press in late 1821 for the opportunity to buy land in the country of Poyais—for the marked-down early bird price of one shilling per acre, if you got in quickly, although the ads warned that the price would be going up in the coming months.102 It must have seemed too good an opportunity for many to ignore. As the centuries-old Spanish empire in the New World finally crumbled, British eyes were hungrily looking at a new opportunity, and investment in Latin America was the hot new thing. By the summer of 1822, the ads weren’t just for the chance to invest in land: they were advertising for settlers to go and start a new life in Poyais, as passengers on the “very commodious and comfortable” Honduras Packet (as one ad in The Times put it).103
To back this up, MacGregor launched a full-blown publicity campaign. He gave interviews in newspapers, he pressed the flesh in high society and he established offices for his imaginary country in London and Edinburgh. Not only that, but, at some expense, he even had an entire leather-bound book published, titled Sketch of the Mosquito Shore, supposedly written by a “Thomas Strangeways, K. G. C.,” who was described as “Captain 1st Native Poyer Regiment, and aide-de-camp to his Highness Gregor, Cazique of Poyais.”
Gregor MacGregor, looking fancy, as he appeared in Sketch of the Mosquito Shore.
Sketch of the Mosquito Shore included a very nice portrait of Gregor looking regal on the first page, plus an idyllic drawing of the Black River lagoon filled with ships. It was this book that promised those rivers that would furnish settlers with “globules of pure gold,” soils that could grow three crops per year, plus friendly native laborers who had a deep and abiding love of the British and who would cheerfully work all year round in return for a small sum of money, or possibly just for clothing.104
(The book also took pains to point out, right at the beginning, that the Mosquito Shore isn’t called that because it has loads of mosquitoes—ha, the very idea!—but rather because of the many small islands that dot its shoreline. Neither of these explanations is actually true; in reality, the Mosquito Coast is named, or misnamed, after the indigenous Miskito people.105 It does have really quite a lot of mosquitoes, though, as the settlers would soon discover.)
In truth, much of the book was simply copied wholesale from several other books about the region that were decades out of date; the material that wasn’t copied was pure fantasy, which testimony at a later libel trial would reveal was actually written by MacGregor himself.
But MacGregor went even further than the book to sell Poyais not merely as an opportunity to create a new colony but as an already-established country with a functioning government, extensive civic infrastructure and a vibrant culture. He would show people a copy of the “Proclamation to the Inhabitants of the Territory of Poyais,” marking the official birth of his nation—a document which he had supposedly distributed across his lands before departing for London—declaring that the king of the Mosquito Shore had granted him the rights to the territory of Poyais in perpetuity. He invented a flag for the country, and a chivalric honor system, awarding potential allies in his scheme the “Order of the Green Cross.” He had “Poyais dollars” printed and provided a chest of them to the settlers to set them up in their new home. He discussed the tripartite structure of Poyais’s system of government. He persuaded an impressionable young Glaswegian clerk named Andrew Picken, who had dreams of the literary life, to write a poem and a ballad singing the praises of Poyais, with the impression given that these were the products of Poyais’s own culture.
Picken would go on to become one of the foremost voices in telling other settlers the good news of the life awaiting them in Saint Joseph, following a wine-fueled chat during which MacGregor strongly suggested that he might be made the head of the national theater of Poyais. Many settlers were similarly promised major posts: one would be the lieutenant governor of Saint Joseph, another the head of the Bank of Poyais. One Edinburgh cobbler named John Hellie (or Heely, documents differ) sold his possessions and left his family behind after he was promised that he would become the official shoemaker to the princess of Poyais.
A Poyais dollar bill, as printed by Gregor MacGregor in Scotland, because there was no such thing as the Bank of Poyais.
Of course, what the settlers found when they got there was...slightly less impressive. They came ashore on the northern coast of modern Honduras, at the western end of the evocatively named Gracias a Dios (Thank God) region. The Black River is today known as the Rio Sico; the lagoon is known variously as Laguna de Ibans or Laguna Ebano.106 It’s still pretty remote and not many people live there, although there is an airport—well, a grass landing strip—and, according to Lonely Planet, a rather nice “eco lodge” catering to the tourist trade.107 All told, probably a fair bit more hospitable than what the passengers on the Honduras Packet faced.
What they faced was nothing very much, other than a lot of jungle, some rubble and an American hermit living in a hut. There was no city, no town, no port and no trade. The rivers were notable for their lack of globules of pure gold. The first batch of settlers from the Honduras Packet spent some weeks obliviously trying to work out how they’d gone wrong and waiting for the Poyer authorities to contact them, all the while living on the shore in tents and rudimentary shelters.
Some weeks later, in March, a second colony ship—the Kennersley Castle—arrived, which was when things started to go even more deeply wrong. For a start, it raised the number of settlers from around seventy to over two hundred, which was a lot more mouths to feed and a lot more bodies to fall ill. Worse, there was immediately friction between the two groups. The new arrivals—who had been hearing Picken’s tales of how wonderful Saint Joseph was all the way over—were particularly unhappy with what they actually found when they arrived. But they also couldn’t understand why the man in charge, Colonel Hector Hall (the one who was supposed to take up the post of lieutenant governor), hadn’t got on with the business of building more permanent shelter, or indeed why he wasn’t even there to greet them.
Partly this was because the people chosen as colonists didn’t really have the skill set you’d want if you were trying to build a town from scratch. They included the banker, some civil servants, a jeweler, a printer, several gardeners, a “gentleman’s servant” and a number of cabinetmakers: all excellent professions, if there’s already a bustling metropolis waiting for you, but of varying use if you need to construct anything bigger than a cabinet first.
But the main reason was that Colonel Hall had already realized what most of the colonists hadn’t yet—that they’d been had, on an epic scale. No Poyer authorities were ever going to contact them. Leaving the shore and moving inland would have meant death. Building a settlement was pointless. With the Honduras Packet having sailed away during a storm, carrying many of their supplies with it, their priority now was rescue. Which was where he was: on an expedition to try to locate the vanished Honduras Packet and to make contact with King George Frederic Augustus (the nominal Miskito ruler of the region, who had been installed largely as a puppet of the British and was the one who had supposedly granted MacGregor the rights to Poyais in the first place).
On his return, having been informed that the king had very little idea what he was talking about, Hall was particularly unhappy to find that the new arrivals had let the Kennersley Castle sail away too. The settlers, for their part, were unhappy that he’d brought only one small barrel of rum back with him.
Things went downhill rapidly. Morale plummeted amid infighting, efforts to construct more shelter failed and, worst of all, with the coming of the rainy season—and the attendant mosquitoes, which turned out to be plentiful—the colonists began to get sick and die. Hall continued to keep his knowledge that they’d been conned to himself, fearing the reaction if word got out, but this only had the effect of increasing the distrust between the groups, especially when he kept on vanishing for long periods of time on mysterious missions. Despairing of ever seeing his family again, the poor shoemaker, John Hellie, shot himself dead in his hammock.108
Eventually, in May, after they had endured several torrid months, a ship from Belize discovered their miserable encampment. This brought good news and bad news. The bad news was that the country they thought they had emigrated to didn’t exist; the good news was that they could leave it. That this was the best course of action was confirmed a few days later, when Hall returned from his latest expedition with a message from King George Frederic Augustus: any land grant MacGregor had claimed was null and void, and the colonists were, in fact, illegally trespassing.
And so the broken colonists were ferried on a series of horrible, cramped voyages to Belize. Some were too sick to even make the journey; many more became sick or worsened on the voyage itself. More than half of them died: of around 270 settlers who had made the journey on the first two ships, perhaps only fifty ever made it back to the UK.
At which point, it’s probably worth noting that this whole business—“shiploads of colonists depart Scotland for dreams of a new paradise in Central America, only for the dream to end in financial ruin, disease and death”—might sound a little...well, familiar.
That’s because, incredibly, this wasn’t the first time it had happened. A hundred and twenty-five years earlier, almost the exact same fate had awaited several thousand Scots, who, convinced by a smooth-talking salesman, had left to found a new colony in Darien, on the Isthmus of Panama. That time, it wasn’t exactly fraud, just a wildly overambitious attempt to found a Scottish empire and prove some theories about global trade, but the effect was much the same. Around half the colonists wound up dead, and many investors were ruined. The whole affair was a profound national humiliation for Scotland, shattering its economy and helping to drive it into an eventual union with England.1
This does rather raise the question: How the hell do people fall for exactly the same thing just over a century later?
To answer that, we need to look at MacGregor himself and work out just how he was able to convince so many people that a country which doesn’t exist was real enough that they should screw their lives up for it. This is where we hit a slight snag, because, unfortunately for both MacGregor’s reputation and our efforts at a balanced portrait of the man, he’s at something of a disadvantage on the historical legacy front. Quite simply, an awful lot of what was written about him at the time was written by people who very clearly hated him.
MacGregor was extremely skilled at sweet-talking people and getting them on his side. Sadly for him, he was absolutely lousy at keeping them there.
First up, it probably won’t come as a huge surprise to you that not only was MacGregor’s country fictitious, but so, too, were large swathes of his biography. True, he was a MacGregor of the Clan Gregor, but he certainly wasn’t the chief of it and wasn’t a direct descendant of Rob Roy; he was from the less-favored side of the family. Yes, he’d served in the British army, but he wasn’t one of the “Die Hards” of the Battle of Albuera, because he’d been quietly booted out of that regiment over a year before the battle, following what was euphemistically described as “a misunderstanding with a superior officer.”109 And it was correct that he’d subsequently been seconded to the Portuguese army...but he lasted only a few months before exactly the same thing happened again.
Precisely where his supposed Portuguese knighthood could have come from, in the space of a few months that was spent mostly pissing off his superiors, is left as an exercise for the reader.
MacGregor’s problem was that, while he undeniably had some talents, his taste for the trappings of status far outstripped his diligence in acquiring that status. As the historian Matthew Brown (who is generally more sympathetic to MacGregor than most other writers) puts it, MacGregor was “a pretentious and status-obsessed man.”110 He’d married into a wealthy and well-connected military family and had followed the time-honored tradition of buying himself promotion through the ranks of the army, becoming more and more insufferable with every extra stripe. After he was kicked out of the service in 1810, rather than engaging in a period of self-examination, he seems to have doubled down, awarding himself the title of colonel and parading around Edinburgh with his wife, dressed in their finest regalia. As a particularly brutal biography of him, published in 1820 by one of his many enemies, put it, he enjoyed his freedom “with little foresight and less reflection.”111
This all came to a sudden and tragic halt in 1811, when MacGregor’s wife, Maria, died. Cut off from her family’s wealth, he couldn’t fund his fancy-pants lifestyle anymore. Cash-strapped and purposeless, he did what many other British ex-military types did at the time: went off to Latin America to fight against the Spanish. Specifically, he hightailed it for Venezuela.
It was in Venezuela that MacGregor came the closest to bridging the gap between his self-image and his actual accomplishments. Like many a gap-year student, he went off on a foreign jaunt and...found himself. He quickly became a close confidant of the great revolutionary general Francisco de Miranda, whom MacGregor regarded with googly-eyed admiration. An inveterate pleasure-seeker and legendary playboy, Miranda shared MacGregor’s taste for the perks of power; unlike MacGregor, he was also a military genius. Not only did MacGregor get in with Miranda, but for a second time he married a woman with connections: Señora Doña Josefa Antonia Andrea Aristeguieta y Lovera, cousin of the now-legendary liberationist Simón Bolívar.
MacGregor’s military record in Venezuela wasn’t perfect, but all told it was pretty solid and included at least one achievement that he would be justly feted for. In fact, it could probably have been much better if he hadn’t had the misfortune to arrive at a low point for the Venezuelan independence forces. He suffered some defeats but was hailed as a hero for commanding a vital month-long retreat from Ocumare in 1816, which saw him lead a force largely composed of recently liberated slaves as they valiantly fought off pursuing enemies—an exceptional rearguard action that allowed the pro-independence army to regroup. Finally, finally, MacGregor had the acclaim he craved—not from invented titles or throwing money around, but from hard-earned achievements.
Anyway, shortly after that, he seems to have had some kind of catastrophic falling-out with the Venezuelans and left their service. Oh, Gregor.
From this point onward, his career got increasingly wild, as he started to go freelance. In 1817, he tried to invade Florida and seize it from the Spanish. His troops ended up spending six months stuck on a small island that they had captured, before Gregor bolted and left them there. He led a disastrous attack on the Isthmus of Darien—the very place where Scotland had suffered such humiliation in the previous century. MacGregor explicitly referenced this in his efforts to raise troops, claiming that one of his ancestors had been on that ill-fated expedition, and painting it as an opportunity to redeem the nation’s honor. It didn’t end up that way; in Portobelo, MacGregor was caught, literally sleeping, by Spanish forces, and ended up having to jump out of his bedroom window minus his trousers and swim for safety (he couldn’t swim).
It was this period that led to many of the unflattering portrayals of him. Michael Rafter, who served under him in Darien and whose brother was executed after the Spanish retook Portobelo, became determined to expose MacGregor—it’s his biography that we’ve already quoted from, which sums our hero up by saying that “M’Gregor was spoiled by prosperity, and his versatility and haughtiness of disposition soon overturned his flattering prospects,” which honestly seems fair.112 Another account of the misadventure describes MacGregor commanding an action from a ship’s quarterdeck with a glass of wine in his hand.113 The Jamaica Gazette wrote it up with the less-than-flattering words, “He sets out upon a freebooting expedition against, as his partisans would call them, his enemies, and closes his career...by plundering his friends... The cause of this said great Leader is now, it seems, become completely useless, and the Hero himself completely unworthy of any more notice.”114
Throughout this period, MacGregor was honing three traits that, in retrospect, seem like trial runs for the Poyais scheme. He had a talent for recruiting his countrymen to his missions, convincing scores of soldiers to leave Scotland and join him in adventures across the ocean. He was already building his fantasy honor system: the “Order of the Green Cross” got its first tryout in Florida. And he was giving free rein to his love of issuing bullshit proclamations and awarding himself the grandest of titles—after one expedition, Rafter writes, in “a lasting monument of the singular aberration of the human intellect, he had the unparalleled effrontery to style himself the ‘Inca of New Grenada’!!”115
The thing is, though, none of this behavior was especially weird in the context of the Caribbean and Latin America at the time.116
I mean, okay, it was kind of weird, but it wasn’t completely outrageous. Giving yourself fancy titles was close to standard operating practice for the caudillos of the region; with empires falling, rising and generally dancing the mambo, territory was in an almost permanent state of flux and always up for grabs; and speculative investments in Latin America were ten a penny on the London exchange, fueling a bubble that would burst not long after the few Poyais survivors straggled home.
And MacGregor does genuinely seem to have been granted some land by King George Frederic Augustus (who would often dispense land in return for political favor and protection)—albeit perhaps not quite as extensive as he claimed, and certainly not so that he could rule over it as a new country. But, still, while pointing at a slice of land and saying “That’s mine now” on a flimsy legal basis, then persuading some impressionable folks to go and settle there at the risk of their very likely death certainly counts as fraud on a grand scale, it’s also not radically different from how rather a lot of colonialism worked.
If MacGregor’s harebrained scheme managed to convince a surprising number of people, it’s because it was as much a reflection of the time as an aberration from it.
That doesn’t fully answer the question, though—because it’s not like there wasn’t plenty of skepticism about MacGregor’s claims to go round. There was, of course, Rafter’s revenge-biography of him, written a year before the Poyais scheme got off the ground. This clearly tipped some people off to the fact that MacGregor was a wrong ’un. But the Poyais venture itself, and especially the book published to support it, received plenty of raised eyebrows in the press.
The London Literary Gazette of February 1, 1823, reviewed Sketch of the Mosquito Shore and had a few questions about some “remarkable peculiarities” in the descriptions of the country, such as “how rivers run up or how their course can extend hundreds of miles beyond the extreme breadth of the country.”
“The whole thing,” the Gazette sniffed, “smacks strongly of the Piratical and Buccaneering affairs of two centuries old.”117
Particularly brutal was the Quarterly Review, a publication known for mixing Tory politics with literary reviews of almost unprecedented savagery. Their write-up of Sketch of the Mosquito Shore in the October 1822 issue is, shall we say, not kind. But to put it in perspective, just one year earlier Percy Bysshe Shelley had accused them of giving John Keats such a harsh review that it literally killed him.118 Even taking into account the heightened sensitivity of Romantic poets, that’s still quite an achievement in the field of nasty criticism, and suggests that, if anything, MacGregor got off lightly.
What’s most notable about the Quarterly Review response is not merely that they’re skeptical. For sure, they denounce the scheme’s principals as “loan-jobbers and land-jobbers,” joke sarcastically about a land “where all manner of grain grows without sowing, and the most delicious fruits without planting, where cows and horses support themselves, and where...roasted pigs run about with forks in their backs, crying, ‘come eat me!’” before finally suggesting that “the whole affair [may be] merely, what is vulgarly called, a hoax.”119
No, the really interesting thing is that the anonymous reviewer in question knows—in extremely fine detail—precisely what they’re talking about. In modern parlance, they’ve got receipts. And also map references. “We must inform them...that Poyais is a paltry ‘town’ of huts and log-houses, belonging to Spain,” they note, accurately, before going into several pages of minutiae about the local political situation and the exact nature of the treaties governing the region, all of which invalidated any claim MacGregor might have had to the land. They predict that “the settlers, if any such egregious simpletons should be found, will be considered...as trespassers, and treated accordingly.” They question whether the book’s author, Captain Strangeways, even exists, and say that, even if he does, nothing in the book gives any evidence of “his having ever set foot on” the Mosquito Shore. Finally, they wonder if Cazique MacGregor might be the same man who, a few years earlier, “being taken by surprise, jumped out of a window, his purse in hand, leaving his breeches behind him.”
By any standards, you’d think that this should have thoroughly cooked MacGregor’s goose; it’s the kind of critical notice that’s hard to come back from. And yet the Poyais scheme seems to have been virtually critic-proof.
We must confront two possibilities: firstly, that many of the settlers might not have been enthusiastic subscribers to the Quarterly Review; and, secondly, that they all fundamentally just really, really wanted MacGregor’s fictions to be true. Which is a pretty powerful force, as extremely public grifters still know to this day.
This desperate desire to believe the fantasy also had staying power. Remarkably, a small group of the duped settlers continued to maintain for years afterward that MacGregor had been blameless in the whole affair, that everything was actually Colonel Hall’s fault and that MacGregor had never actually mentioned many of the wilder things he was accused of promising the colonists—that was all down to the overactive imaginations of people like Picken. (This defense doesn’t really stack up; while the settlers may certainly have talked themselves into believing more than even MacGregor sold them, it’s hard to overlook the explicitly fraudulent details that MacGregor put into print—like how investors could claim their land by “presenting the title deeds at the Register Office in the town of St Joseph’s, Poyais.”)
But it wasn’t just the victims of MacGregor’s scheme who desperately wanted it to be true. Despite all the overt elements of scam, the central question of MacGregor’s story remains: How much was he a con man, and how much did he truly believe? This question is especially persistent when you consider what happened after his scheme was exposed and he became a punch line to every joke in town, which is this: he simply carried on as if very little had happened.
He doesn’t seem to have shown any remorse for the deaths of the people who trusted him—his only acknowledgment of the stories the survivors told when they got home was to sue the Morning Herald newspaper for libel after they printed a report of the survivors’ testimony. He lost without ever turning up to court, because he’d fled to France—where he immediately set about trying to sell the Poyais scheme all over again.
In 1825, the London stock market crashed as the Latin American bubble burst, triggered in large part by the Poyais affair. Over sixty banks went under, the Bank of England had to be bailed out by the French and the effects were felt around the globe. MacGregor, meanwhile, was in France, writing the Constitution of Poyais and recruiting a new band of settlers. The French authorities caught wind of what he was doing only when they received an unusual number of passport requests from people wanting to travel to a country that didn’t appear on any maps. MacGregor was arrested and charged with fraud, but the trial collapsed.
In total, MacGregor would subsequently spend over a decade more of his life trying to get his Poyais scheme off the ground, continuing to pursue it long after there was any chance of it being a successful con.
Tamar Frankel, a professor at Boston University School of Law, studied the profile of financial con artists in her 2012 book The Ponzi Scheme Puzzle. Some of the traits she identifies are unsurprising: con artists are lacking in empathy, narcissistic, greedy and self-justifying. When caught, they will deny and deflect, blaming just about anybody else rather than taking responsibility. They often justify their actions with the belief that they’re simply reflecting the behavior of others: everyone else is crooked, too, and the victims deserved it because they were equally greedy and corrupt. “You can’t con an honest man,” as the saying goes. (Which is nonsense. You absolutely can! Some honest people are total suckers.)
But that’s not all. In addition, con artists often have what Frankel calls an “addiction to unrealistic dreams and overwhelming ambitions”;120 comparing the skills of the con artist to that of an actor, she suggests, “It may well be that con artists act the character they have long been dreaming of.”121 MacGregor’s dreams of an entire country may have been a little bit more unrealistic and overwhelming than many others...but the fundamentals were the same.
That apparently genuine belief in their schemes doesn’t just help explain the actions of con artists themselves; it’s also part of the reason why people trust them. “Their belief,” Frankel writes, “can make them believable.”122
Today, thanks to decades of movies and TV shows that delight in depicting the perfect con, we have the idea that all scams have to operate at a mind-bending level of complexity, filled with twists and turns and unexpected double-crosses. So it’s perhaps worth remembering where we get the word from. The term “con” may be a generic one now, but its origins are very specific. The phrase “confidence man” was initially used about just one person: a chap named William Thompson.
Thompson was a scammer who operated in New York in the late 1840s, and his scam was one of glorious simplicity. A well-dressed and suave gentleman, Thompson would approach strangers in the street, strike up a genial conversation with them and then ask them the following question: “Have you confidence in me to trust me with your watch until tomorrow?”123
Thrown by the unexpected request, plenty of people would simply comply. Whereupon Thompson would...take off with their watch. Outstanding.
Thompson may have been the first to get the title of “con man,” but of course there have been swindlers ever since there have been suckers, which is to say forever. Perhaps America’s first truly legendary grifter was Tom Bell, who operated in the first half of the eighteenth century. Having been expelled from Harvard following a history of “saucy behavior,” he used his knowledge of the social cues of America’s wealthy elite to scam his way across the colony for many years, ruthlessly exploiting the assumption that someone with nice clothes and the airs of the upper classes couldn’t possibly be a crook. (He may well also have been the scammer who, in the guise of a schoolmaster named William Lloyd, stole a ruffled shirt and a handkerchief from Benjamin Franklin after talking his way into Franklin’s house. That’s not an especially inventive con—I’d just started to feel uncomfortable because we hadn’t mentioned Franklin in a while.)
If you’d like an example of a genuinely complicated scam with some far-reaching consequences, you can’t do much better than Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, “Comtesse de la Motte,” a social-climbing French con artist who parlayed her self-bestowed title and entirely invented friendship with Marie Antoinette into a scam to buy a priceless diamond necklace with borrowed money—a scheme that at one point involved her hiring a prostitute to impersonate the queen in a meeting with a Catholic cardinal (who Jeanne was also having an affair with). The scam nearly came off but failed when the queen got word of it. While Jeanne was tried, convicted and jailed for the crime, it didn’t work out terribly well for Marie Antoinette either; the trial focused public attention on the lavish spending of the royal family, turning her from a not terribly popular queen into a wildly unpopular one. All of which would help spark the French Revolution a few years later and led to Marie’s eventual appointment with the guillotine.
Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, or as she liked to call herself, Comtesse de la Motte.
But, while these grifters were motivated largely by wealth, one of the most fascinating con artists of all time was motivated by something very different.
This tale begins in the autumn of 1951, in Edmundston, Canada, when Mary Cyr picked up a newspaper and was surprised to read a story about how her son, Joseph, was a war hero.
The paper recounted how, serving with the Canadian navy in the Korean War, Dr. Joseph C. Cyr had saved the lives of many badly wounded South Korean soldiers. They’d been picked up in a small boat, on the verge of death—but, performing emergency surgery right through the night in an improvised operating theater while the ship rode out a fierce storm, including removing a bullet from right next to one man’s heart, Dr. Cyr had brought them all through safely. Happy to have some good news from the war, the Canadian military’s press office was proudly trumpeting his selfless heroism and skill.
The reason this all came as a surprise to Mary was because she was pretty sure her son wasn’t in the Canadian navy, and he almost certainly wasn’t somewhere off the coast of Korea. In fact, he was supposed to be in general practice, about forty miles down the road. Still, she thought it best to double-check.
It was perhaps unsurprising that Joseph Cyr—an easygoing and kind man, who was fluently bilingual, having an anglophone mother and a francophone father124—had wound up practicing medicine in the small, extremely bilingually named New Brunswick community of Grand Falls / Grand-Sault, located a stone’s throw from Canada’s border with Maine. And that’s exactly where he was, quietly minding his own business, when he started getting the phone calls asking him if he was on a ship in Korea.
His initial instinct—to pass it off as a simple case of mistaken identity, someone with the same name—quickly foundered when it turned out that he was the only Dr. Joseph C. Cyr in Canada. He remembered that several of his medical diplomas and other identifying documents had gone missing the previous winter. And thinking about it, he knew who had taken them—Brother John, a local monk he had become good friends with, shortly before Brother John mysteriously vanished.
Brother John, of course, was not actually Brother John. Nor was he the biologist and cancer researcher Dr. Cecil B. Hamann, the identity Brother John had gone by before turning to the Church. He also wasn’t Dr. Robert Linton French, the Stanford-educated psychologist he had previously been, before becoming Drs. Hamann and Cyr.
Brother John was in fact an American named Ferdinand Waldo Demara, a man who would soon become immortalized as “the Great Impostor.” Demara stands out among the ranks of legendary con artists by virtue of apparently not being particularly motivated by financial gain. I mean, sure, he passed his fair share of bad checks and abused the odd expense account during his career, but he never used his undoubted skills to pursue vast quantities of wealth or a jet-set lifestyle. He had a talent for social engineering, persuading bureaucracies to give up people’s identity documents and convincing people from all walks of life to put him in positions of trust—a talent that he could have used for terrible ends, but which he actually used almost exclusively to inveigle himself into a series of perfectly worthy and upright public-service jobs. Over the years, he would be a doctor, a sheriff’s deputy, a law student, a prison warden, a lot of teachers and a wide variety of monks, and he would found both a college philosophy department and a whole university.
Demara didn’t con people to get their money. He conned people to get their respect—and, perhaps, his own too.
The thing about Demara is that he wasn’t just good at scamming his way into jobs; he was often surprisingly good at doing them too. He was a lightning-fast learner with a near-as-dammit photographic memory. As Dr. French, he managed to convince a Catholic college in Pennsylvania to make him the dean of their new school of philosophy and would go on to teach psychology at another Catholic college (his secret, he said, was doing the reading just ahead of the class—“the best way to learn anything is to teach it”125). As Cecil B. Hamann / Brother John, lacking a college to teach at while studying as a novice with the Brothers of Christian Instruction, he managed to railroad both the monks and the local authorities into founding a private university—only to storm off in a fit of pique when they gave it a name he didn’t like. (The university he founded still exists today, after a change of both name and location, as Walsh University in Ohio.) And, of course, there was his miraculous, lifesaving work on board HMCS Cayuga as Dr. Cyr, which he managed by sneaking into his cabin and speed-reading a surgical textbook shortly before operating.
Those kind of prodigious talents would have served him perfectly well under his own name—would have made him famous, even—but Demara seems to have never felt comfortable as himself. He was trying to find his place in the world, and becoming somebody else—particularly somebody with credentials that Demara lacked—seemed to offer a shortcut past the boredom and frustrations of having to navigate life in the slow lane.
He found it hard to settle, never entirely sure which of his many personas he truly wanted to be. He would return to teaching repeatedly; he tried enlisting in (and going AWOL from) the military several times under various guises; his numerous efforts to take religious orders, both as himself and under a suite of aliases, seem to have been at least partly based on a genuine desire for spiritual development. His search for a sense of vocation reads like a fun house–mirror version of people in their twenties bouncing between careers as they try to figure out who they are. (Note for younger readers: this was a thing you could do before the crash of 2008. It was nifty!)
After he was exposed for not being Joseph Cyr in 1951, his case became a sensation across North America. In 1952, he granted a lengthy interview to Life magazine in which he told his (quite possibly unreliable) version of the story, at the end of which he expressed his desire to maybe, finally, just be himself.
He would express the same desire to the press in 1956,126 when he was arrested following his stint as Benjamin W. Jones, a prison warden in Texas—a job that came to an end when one of the prisoners recognized him from an old copy of Life magazine. That plan to settle down as plain old Ferdinand lasted barely a few months before, suddenly, he was Martin Godgart, a teacher at a needy school on a remote island in Maine. After he was arrested there, he told his story again, this time to the author Robert Crichton, insisting that he was definitely going to go straight. Sometime after that, he was Godgart again, this time teaching indigenous children in Point Barrow, Alaska, at the very tip of the northernmost point of the United States—the most remote place imaginable, as though he was trying to physically run as far as possible from his past. That was all going terribly well until a passing trapper recognized him from Life magazine again. After that, he tried being a bridge engineer in Mexico and a prison governor in Cuba, with limited success.
Crichton would go on to turn his story into the bestselling book The Great Impostor, which itself would become a light comedy film starring Tony Curtis. Demara was unhappy. He complained that the film took liberties with the truth.
By this point, Demara had reached such a level of fame that he could no longer pass himself off as anybody else. From 1960 onward, trapped by his own notoriety, he was forced to live in the prison of himself. He finally took religious orders once more and became a pastor—under his own name, this time—living out another two decades of good, generous life in a loving community, as Ferdinand Waldo Demara. When he died, in 1982, his doctor told the AP, “He was about the most miserable, unhappy man I have known.”127
Demara was able to flit between identities and establish himself in positions of responsibility so easily because he exploited structural qualities of American society at the time. His progress was eased by a flurry of letters of recommendation from sundry bishops and other notables (all written for the person he was impersonating), all of which were taken on trust and seen as validating his identity. Once he had a foot in the door, he knew what levers to pull to cement his position. As Crichton put it in The Great Impostor, Demara’s key insight was that “in any organization there is always a lot of loose, unused power lying about which can be picked up without alienating anyone.”128 Which, honestly, would work just as well as the basis for a corporate self-help book on how to get ahead in the business world as it does for the biography of a con man.
Good con artists adapt to—indeed, are products of—the cultures in which they operate. Where Demara found the loopholes in 1950s USA, Vladimir Gromov did the same for the Soviet state of the 1920s and ’30s.
Stalin’s Soviet Union might not immediately seem like an ideal place to earn a living as a con artist, and, indeed, if you judge Gromov’s life by petty metrics like whether he was sentenced to death at the age of thirty-six, then he might have been wiser to seek an alternative profession. On the other hand, if you judge it by whether he managed to get his death sentence commuted by writing a play about a love affair between a Bolshevik man and a beautiful capitalist woman half his age, which he sent to the deputy procurator-general of the USSR, then things look a bit rosier for Gromov.
Gromov’s insight was that the climate of fear, oppressive bureaucracy and ideological rigidity of the early Stalin years was in fact ripe for exploitation—which he managed to do in spades, appearing in a wide variety of guises as an expert engineer or an acclaimed architect, amassing a small fortune along the way.
He realized that the Soviet bureaucracy’s unquenchable hunger for documentation left the system with very little capacity to actually check the validity of the reams of paper they were accumulating. So instead of trying to fly under the radar, he opted to flood the system, stealing or forging documents with wild abandon to enable him to hop between “jobs.” Any questions he might face could be deflected with the proper appeals to Bolshevik dogma, and, once he had persuaded somebody to accept his identity, he exploited the intimidating power of status under Stalin to ensure that nobody else would question him—a perfect bullshit feedback loop, enforced by the very authoritarian culture that was supposed to stamp out transgression. In the words of the historian Golfo Alexopoulos, “He did not avoid the authorities but bombarded them with false employment papers, phony requests for money and goods, and vicious denunciations.”129
His standard modus operandi was to establish phony credentials with the help of fake documents and to use that to get himself an appointment to a senior role in a state industry—ideally one in a far-flung location somewhere in the Soviet empire. He would obviously need his wages advanced and his travel expenses paid up front. By the time the coal mine in Vladivostok realized that their chief engineer had never turned up, Gromov would be somewhere else, already starting on a new “job.”
The crowning achievement of Gromov’s scamming came when he managed to get himself appointed to the exalted role of engineer-architect for a major new fish cannery near the Kazakhstan-China border. Now, this might not immediately strike you as the world’s most glamorous assignment, but in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, it was a really big deal. So much so that Gromov managed to persuade the commissar of supply, Anastas Mikoian, to send him the vast sum of one million rubles, through the cunning technique of asking for two million rubles. (To give you a sense of how much that was, the average yearly salary at the time was just over 1,500 rubles.130)
The Kazakh cannery was the peak of his career, but, unfortunately for Gromov, it was also where his downfall occurred. That’s because he made the classic mistake of abandoning his tried-and-trusted methods—namely, the method of bolting before anybody sniffed him out. This time, Gromov felt that he was onto such a good thing that he decided to stay on the ride and fully embrace his false identity as an engineer-architect. Possibly, much like Demara, he just wanted to put down some roots and actually become the person he was pretending to be. Maybe the power and money went to his head. Alexopoulos suggests that “perhaps Gromov ceased to be an imposter by 1934, not because he had internalized or come to believe his own lies, but because he viewed those around him at Glavryba’s monumental construction project as essentially no different from himself.”131 In other words, if everybody else was faking it, why shouldn’t he?
But this desire to settle down into his newfound status couldn’t actually survive too much contact with the harsh reality that, bluntly, he didn’t actually have many skills in the fields of engineering, architecture or fish canning. Gromov’s tactics of denouncing anybody who questioned him as an enemy of Stalinism were effective in the short-term, when he was constantly on the move...but, after too long in one place, they merely built up a critical mass of people with an enormous grudge against him.
But even after his arrest and death sentence, he still managed to escape, one last time, turning the creative energies that had fueled his production of imaginary work orders, invoices and telegrams into a more traditional form of fiction.
His prison-produced play, titled Love and Motherland, may not have been terribly good. In fact, when the procurators passed it on to the head of the playwrights’ union for a professional opinion of Gromov’s literary merits, it received the kind of critical notice that would terrify any author, never mind one who was relying on a single manuscript to save him from execution. The union man wrote that Gromov’s “playwriting ability is extremely low” and that “the work has no ideological or artistic value and is clearly unacceptable from any standpoint.”132 I think it’s fairly safe to say that John Keats would not have coped well with a review like that.
And yet, miraculously, it worked. Gromov’s death sentence was commuted to ten years of labor. To this day, it remains unclear exactly what could possibly have convinced a senior Soviet official to spare Gromov’s life simply on the basis of a play depicting a senior Soviet official as a handsome and heroic figure who bones a hot twenty-three-year-old Parisian woman and converts her to socialism through the power of his ideological and sexual magnetism. Ah, well—I guess that will just have to remain as one of those inscrutable historical mysteries we will never solve.
If this ability to find the loopholes in society and ruthlessly exploit them is the mark of a great con artist, then the star of our final story must stand as one of the greatest.
While Gregor MacGregor may have been the grifter in history who operated on the largest stage, this is the tale of a woman whose ambition and chutzpah matched Gregor’s step for step, but she worked at the other end of the detail scale. Where MacGregor’s scam required him to invent a whole country, Thérèse Humbert’s revolved entirely around the contents of one single locked safe—a prop that, through a gloriously simple piece of legal judo, enabled this formerly penniless country girl with an overactive imagination to spend two entire decades living a life of luxury in the Paris of the belle époque.
That safe contained, it was said, a set of bonds worth an estimated 100 million francs. These had supposedly been bequeathed to Thérèse by a mysterious American gentleman named Robert Henry Crawford, whose life she had saved on a train, some years before, when he had suffered a heart attack. Out of gratitude, he pledged to reward her handsomely—a promise he kept in his will, which he changed shortly before his death so that she would inherit much of his vast fortune.
On the basis of this imminent wealth, Thérèse was able to borrow money freely, as lenders gleefully anticipated the huge returns they would shortly get. It wasn’t a complex scam; fundamentally, it’s just the old “check’s in the post” routine. And, of course, that trick works only for a limited time—because eventually the postman turns up empty-handed.
Thérèse Humbert knew this perfectly well, because she had a long history of inventing wealthy benefactors before eventually getting caught. Ever since she was a child, the line between her real life and her fantasy life had been blurry, verging on nonexistent. In this, she was influenced by her father, Auguste Daurignac, an eccentric and somewhat pathetic dreamer who believed himself descended from nobility. He spent his later years insisting that he could do magic and spiraling into debt while reassuring his creditors that he had documents proving he was due a vast inheritance, which were locked in an old chest.
Forced by her father’s cognitive absence to run the household, Thérèse Daurignac took his fantasies and turned them into a practical, if temporary, source of income. Charming and utterly ingenuous, she ran up debts with virtually every tradesperson in the greater Toulouse area, all the while promising that they would be paid after a nonexistent inheritance came through, or after a fictional wedding to the scion of a great shipping family. As her biographer Hilary Spurling writes, “All her life Thérèse treated money as an illusion: a confidence or conjuring trick that had to be mastered.”133
But as was bound to happen, that particular con ran out of road, and the Daurignacs were evicted from their home in a whirlwind of debt. But it wasn’t long before they bounced back, powered once again by Thérèse’s wild imagination. This time, it was one of her longest-standing fantasies that aided her cause: the Château de Marcotte, a grand mansion, far away on the coast, which she had long daydreamed about inhabiting.
Thérèse Humbert
The Château de Marcotte didn’t actually exist, but that had never stopped Thérèse talking about it like it was the most real thing in the world. “She lied as the bird sings,” as one acquaintance would later recall.134 And so convinced—and convincing—was she in her descriptions of this luxurious property, with its marble floors and lush gardens, that she seems to have persuaded plenty of other people that it was real too. Included in that was her future father-in-law, Gustave Humbert, a senator and rising star of French politics. Humbert didn’t just approve of his son Frédéric marrying Thérèse; he also gave the thumbs-up to his daughter, Alice, simultaneously marrying Thérèse’s brother, Emile, in a double wedding. Exactly why an ambitious (but not wealthy) politician would want to tie his family so closely to a bunch of weird, impoverished ne’er-do-wells like the Daurignacs is a bit of a mystery, until you factor in the possible lure of them having a very big house in the country.
Oh, also, the newlyweds were cousins. Humbert’s wife was Thérèse’s aunt. Little extra detail for you there.
With her new political connections, Thérèse was right back in the game, and, with the senator’s help, quickly set about borrowing money against both her fictional château, as well as a fictional cork plantation in Portugal. But soon she wanted more, and so, in 1883, Robert Henry Crawford and his 100-million-franc will came onto the scene. The promise of that inheritance, and the money she could borrow in advance of it, would in itself have probably kept the Humberts going for a few years. But this is where Thérèse (quite possibly in collaboration with both her husband and her father-in-law) played her master stroke.
If the British weakness that MacGregor exploited was its predilection for colonial fantasy, and if the American weakness that Demara exploited was its reverence for credentials and its careless assignment of individual power, and if the Soviet weakness that Gromov exploited was its oppressive ideology and bureaucracy, then the French weakness that Humbert exploited was this: its shit-awful legal system. The French courts of the time were notorious for the slow, grinding way they proceeded and for their only fleeting attachment to notions of justice. It was in this context that Thérèse came up with a plan to extend the lifespan of her con—a plan so simple and so cunning that, frankly, I’m in awe.
She sued herself.
Or, more precisely, she invented a couple of fictional American nephews of her fictional American benefactor, in order that they could sue her, contesting the will. The point of this was not that they should win—in fact, the most important thing was that nobody ever be allowed to win, with every verdict leading to another appeal, and counter-appeal, and then around again, all at the slowest possible pace that the French courts could achieve. The Crawford brothers never even needed to make an appearance, instead instructing some of Paris’s finest lawyers by letter from across the ocean. The only thing that mattered was that the case drag out indefinitely, so another year could go by in which Thérèse was kept from the inheritance she was permanently on the brink of acquiring and so would be forced to borrow vast sums of money from a swarm of eager lenders.
And, all that time, by the strict order of the court, the actual documents must be locked securely away in Thérèse’s safe, never to be seen.
The Humberts managed to keep this going for twenty magnificent years: two decades in which they lived the most extravagant lives possible in Paris, at a time when the bar for extravagant Parisian living was really very high indeed. Thérèse and her husband occupied one of the most luxurious apartments on the avenue de la Grande-Armée; their parties were legendary and attended by all the great and the good of the time, from the actress Sarah Bernhardt to the president of the republic. Thérèse, a wide-eyed country girl from an impoverished family, was now one of the most influential women in France.
And, if occasionally one of Thérèse’s creditors got anxious about the vast sums of money they had given her with no return, and started making threatening noises, well...most of the influential people they could have turned to for help enjoyed going to the Thérèse’s parties.
The scheme’s downfall, when it came, was abrupt, and stemmed from a simple and uncharacteristic slip: Thérèse made the mistake, when asked to provide an address for the Crawford brothers in New York, of simply making one up. She may have thought it would be too much effort for anybody to check and find that nobody called Crawford lived at 1302 Broadway, but when there were millions of francs involved and an increasingly upset army of creditors gathering, the effort barrier suddenly became much lower. A court finally grew suspicious and ordered that the will be examined.
And so it was that, on May 9, 1902, a huge crowd of up to ten thousand gathered on the avenue de la Grande-Armée to witness the famous safe being lowered from the Humberts’ apartment and opened. After some effort, the appointed locksmiths finally forced it open with hammers. The crowd peered eagerly inside, hoping to finally get a glimpse of the vast riches contained within.
They were rather surprised when the contents of the safe were revealed to be, in total, “an old newspaper, an Italian penny, and a trouser button.”135
The famous safe being lowered from Thérèse’s home.
Thérèse Humbert managed to convert that newspaper, coin and button into decades of luxury simply because she had an instinctive knack for how to exploit the weaknesses in her fellow humans and the social systems they’d created.
As a friend of hers, who wrote anonymously under the very cool name of “Madame X,” put it:
What demonstrates above all else the genius of Thérèse is the grandeur, the sheer immensity of the scale on which she operated. If she had laid claim to an inheritance of no more than four or six million, she would not have lasted two years, and would with difficulty have managed to raise a miserable few thousand francs. But a hundred million! People took their hats off to a sum like that as they would have done before the Pyramid of Cheops, and their admiration prevented them from seeing straight.136
1 If you fancy reading more about the Darien affair, there’s a hefty section on it in the author’s previous book, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up.