Notes from "Drake's Fortune; The Fabulous True Story of the World's Greatest Confidence Artist" by Richard Rayner
Oscar Hartzell was born in 1876 on the Illinois prairie. Bankrupt after failing at both farming and ranching, Hartzell was taken in by a scam that promised investors a share in the long-lost fortune of Sir Francis Drake. Once he figured out the fraud, and how it worked, he conned the con artists out of their own con, and proceeded to make millions for himself. Though he was eventually tried and jailed for fraud, the scam--and some victims' belief in it--carried on for years.
In 1572, Francis Drake (not yet "Sir") stole a treasure worth 40,000 pounds sterling in Elizabethan money from a Spanish party transporting it across the Isthmus of Panama. Since Drake had done so well on this expedition, the Queen soon sanctioned another--and backed it financially herself, along with the Earl of Leicester and Sir Francis Walsingham. It was this second voyage in which Drake circumnavigated the globe (the first Briton to do so). He careened somewhere along the Pacific coast of North America, claiming the land as "New Albion". On the voyage home, he captured a Spanish treasure ship. His return to England yielded a return for his investors of over 4,500%. The queen's share of the booty was 100,000 pounds sterling--an amount sufficient to stake England's growth into a colonial world power.
Drake became a very wealthy man as well as a baronet. He bought Buckland Abbey as his home, and applied for a coat of arms. He died at sea off Panama in 1596, on a late-in-life expedition to wrest yet more plunder from the Spanish on behalf of his queen. Despite having been married twice, Drake died without any children. So his estate passed to his brother and nephews.
Given his romantic history as a pirate, explorer, and hero of England's first major naval victory against the Spanish Armada, it wasn't long before rumors began to circulate about the validity of Drake's will. Fortune hunters abounded, and confidence schemes grew up around the legendary fortune. Fraudulent schemes surrounding the mythical fortune were documented as early as the late 1800s. In 1900, a gang of swindlers wrote to every Drake they could find in the new American telephone directories. Each Drake was personally informed that they were the true heirs of the estate, and that a modest legal fee could secure their claim. Many were taken in.
By 1909, a woman named Sudie Whittaker was the most successful Drake promoter in America. She claimed that her cousin, a Mr. George Drake of Roachport Missouri, was the true heir to the Drake fortune. She had an impressive genealogical document created to support her claim. As George Drake was a man of only modest means, he needed investors to help with the finances of pressing his claim. Sudie hooked up with a lawyer named Milo Lewis. Lewis's genuine law degree gave apparent validity to Sudie's sales performance, and he helped her keep the scam in a legal gray area.
Oscar Hartzell was originally a dupe, then was hired on as an assistant, but he gradually took over the scam to run as his own. At first he believed in the basic proposition of the Drake Estate, and was certain a genuine fortune could be obtained. The premise was plausible: some Americans had found themselves to be the legal heirs of distant relatives in the old country. There were lots of Drakes in the American Midwest--many of them descended from some obscure branch of Sir Francis's family.
Oscar Hartzell, Sudie Whittaker, and Milo Lewis traveled to London in 1916. When Lewis was disbarred back in the U.S. for bigamy, Hartzell seized his chance to take control over what he by then knew to be a complete scam. Hartzell was able to convince investors that Drake's fortune was real, and the plan to obtain it for American heirs a sound one, but that Lewis and Whittaker were crooks and not to be trusted. He announced that George Drake, and his heir, Ernest Drake, were not, in fact, the legitimate heirs to the Drake Estate. The Hartzell versus Lewis and Whittaker fight over control of the scam only served to heighten its credibility. After all, who would fight so hard over nothing?
Hartzell found another confederate in London--an American lawyer named Arthur Sylvester Welch--who helped him invent a new twist on the old scheme. Rather than selling shares, they requested donations. They reckoned "donations" were safer from the law than "investments." Donators were promised a full refund, plus 6% compound interest, plus a discretionary bonus promised to be in the neighborhood of 1,000 to 1. Hartzell recruited local agents to canvass for donations, and demanded his own share of $2,500/week (more like $25,000 in today's terms). He then returned to England where he remained for the next eleven years.
Hartzell grew more and more inventive. Sir Francis Drake, it seemed, had had a third and secret marriage, resulting in a son. This son was Drake's true heir, and his descendent was declared to be a Colonel Drexel Drake living in London. Colonel Drexel Drake did not exist, but this did not stop Hartzell from claiming to be engaged to marry the colonel's (also nonexistent) niece. On the occasion of their fictitious engagement, the Colonel had signed over all interest in the Drake fortune to none other than Oscar Hartzell. Hartzell claimed he was also going to seek restitution from the British government, with interest, as Queen Elizabeth had originally grabbed more than her fair share of the treasure. Drake's secret 3rd wife had been Queen Elizabeth I herself. The current king was planning to sign over monies and properties to Hartzell, but was delayed by illness. The new Lord Chancellor reviewed the papers and found a small clerical error. There was panic at the Bank of England over the billions soon to be leaving British shores for America.
Cons of all kinds flourished in the boom of the 1920ies: scammers sold shares in the League of Nations, or in fictitious gold and platinum mines, land speculation, or fraudulent oil well ventures. People believed because there were so many true reports of others getting rich quick and they didn't want to be left behind. In the Midwest, the Drake Estate became a craze.
The 1929 stock-market crash put an end to most of the swindles that had been popular during the decade, but not the Drake scam. Somehow the faith of the Midwesterners in Hartzell was confirmed by the failure of Wall Street. Hartzell turned these details to his advantage: fear of the Drake Estate settlement had paralyzed financial institutions and caused the depression.
A scholarly article by John Maynard Keynes used an example of the original Drake fortune and how its investment by Queen Elizabeth I had led directly to England's becoming a world power. He meant it as an example of the power of compound interest over time, but "the Drakers" took it as validation.
Still living in England, Hartzell fell under the influence of a medium or fortune-teller, a Mrs. Nina St. John Montague. At the same time back home, he became the subject of a major investigation by U.S. postal inspector, John Sparks. Mail fraud cases were divided into "land swindles, oil well swindles, fake dog pedigree swindles, bogus work-at-home schemes, and bogus literary agencies; there were fake diploma rackets, astrology rackets, and fake prize contests. And so on...--including the category of genealogical swindles.
In January of 1933, Hartzell was deported from England, and returned (traveling in first class on a luxury ocean liner) to the U.S.. He was arrested as soon as the ship docked, and taken to Iowa to stand trial. The authorities wanted him, but the crowds of duped investors who gathered to cheer him on continued to believe in the Drake Estate as their way out. Oscar Hartzell had achieved the status of folk hero.
People attributed major diplomatic, political, and financial developments on the world stage to the imminent settlement of the Drake Estate. It was even claimed that all territory north of the Rio Grande and west of the Mississippi river would be included in the final settlement--based on the claim that Francis Drake had landed in what is now California and laid claim to the region. On the witness stand at Hartzell's fraud trial, one believer said, "Our deal is the cause of the depression, having tied up the finances of the whole world."
Hartzell was sentenced to 10 years in Leavenworth prison plus a $2,000 fine. When his appeals were finally exhausted in January of 1935, he was taken to prison. But Oscar's imprisonment barely made a dent in the continued progress of the scheme. People chose to believe that his imprisonment was unjust, or that it was a fake and he wasn't really in Leavenworth at all.
When the infamous "Drake Plaque" was discovered in Northern California the late 1930ies, it seemed to lend credence to the suggestion that California might be part of the Drake Estate. The plaque was an elaborate practical joke, but was widely considered to be a genuine artifact of Drake's visit to the west coast. People wrote to the State Department, to enquire if the plaque were connected with shares they'd bought in the Drake Estate deal. Californians had been buying these shares from a resurfaced Sudie Whittaker.
Hartzell assured the prison psychiatrists that the estate would be settled any day, and his innocence proven. He claimed he would officially be given the name "Sir Francis Drake." He was eventually diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Hartzell died in prison of throat cancer in 1943. But the legacy of the Drake Estate scam lives on in descendents such as the well-known internet "Nigerian scam".
The term "confidence man" was coined in 1848. Before then, the typical term for that sort of swindle was "diddling"--after a character named "Jeremy Diddler" in long-forgotten eponymous play. The art of the con man is to present the unreal as if it were truth. There has to be a certain plausibility to the tale, and delays and obstacles lend to the credibility as well as providing additional opportunities to ask for more money. Such swindles play upon greed, and the hope of something for nothing.
Back in 1591-1592, Robert Greene (who was also Shakespeare's first critic) wrote two pamphlets about "cony-catchers." "A Notable Discovery of Cosenage" was the longer of the two, in which the author detailed the methods of "the Fetcher, the Shifter, the Ruffler, the Prigger, the Cross-Biter, the nip, the Foist, and the Deceipts of their Doxies."
Oscar Hartzell was born in 1876 on the Illinois prairie. Bankrupt after failing at both farming and ranching, Hartzell was taken in by a scam that promised investors a share in the long-lost fortune of Sir Francis Drake. Once he figured out the fraud, and how it worked, he conned the con artists out of their own con, and proceeded to make millions for himself. Though he was eventually tried and jailed for fraud, the scam--and some victims' belief in it--carried on for years.
In 1572, Francis Drake (not yet "Sir") stole a treasure worth 40,000 pounds sterling in Elizabethan money from a Spanish party transporting it across the Isthmus of Panama. Since Drake had done so well on this expedition, the Queen soon sanctioned another--and backed it financially herself, along with the Earl of Leicester and Sir Francis Walsingham. It was this second voyage in which Drake circumnavigated the globe (the first Briton to do so). He careened somewhere along the Pacific coast of North America, claiming the land as "New Albion". On the voyage home, he captured a Spanish treasure ship. His return to England yielded a return for his investors of over 4,500%. The queen's share of the booty was 100,000 pounds sterling--an amount sufficient to stake England's growth into a colonial world power.
Drake became a very wealthy man as well as a baronet. He bought Buckland Abbey as his home, and applied for a coat of arms. He died at sea off Panama in 1596, on a late-in-life expedition to wrest yet more plunder from the Spanish on behalf of his queen. Despite having been married twice, Drake died without any children. So his estate passed to his brother and nephews.
Given his romantic history as a pirate, explorer, and hero of England's first major naval victory against the Spanish Armada, it wasn't long before rumors began to circulate about the validity of Drake's will. Fortune hunters abounded, and confidence schemes grew up around the legendary fortune. Fraudulent schemes surrounding the mythical fortune were documented as early as the late 1800s. In 1900, a gang of swindlers wrote to every Drake they could find in the new American telephone directories. Each Drake was personally informed that they were the true heirs of the estate, and that a modest legal fee could secure their claim. Many were taken in.
By 1909, a woman named Sudie Whittaker was the most successful Drake promoter in America. She claimed that her cousin, a Mr. George Drake of Roachport Missouri, was the true heir to the Drake fortune. She had an impressive genealogical document created to support her claim. As George Drake was a man of only modest means, he needed investors to help with the finances of pressing his claim. Sudie hooked up with a lawyer named Milo Lewis. Lewis's genuine law degree gave apparent validity to Sudie's sales performance, and he helped her keep the scam in a legal gray area.
Oscar Hartzell was originally a dupe, then was hired on as an assistant, but he gradually took over the scam to run as his own. At first he believed in the basic proposition of the Drake Estate, and was certain a genuine fortune could be obtained. The premise was plausible: some Americans had found themselves to be the legal heirs of distant relatives in the old country. There were lots of Drakes in the American Midwest--many of them descended from some obscure branch of Sir Francis's family.
Oscar Hartzell, Sudie Whittaker, and Milo Lewis traveled to London in 1916. When Lewis was disbarred back in the U.S. for bigamy, Hartzell seized his chance to take control over what he by then knew to be a complete scam. Hartzell was able to convince investors that Drake's fortune was real, and the plan to obtain it for American heirs a sound one, but that Lewis and Whittaker were crooks and not to be trusted. He announced that George Drake, and his heir, Ernest Drake, were not, in fact, the legitimate heirs to the Drake Estate. The Hartzell versus Lewis and Whittaker fight over control of the scam only served to heighten its credibility. After all, who would fight so hard over nothing?
Hartzell found another confederate in London--an American lawyer named Arthur Sylvester Welch--who helped him invent a new twist on the old scheme. Rather than selling shares, they requested donations. They reckoned "donations" were safer from the law than "investments." Donators were promised a full refund, plus 6% compound interest, plus a discretionary bonus promised to be in the neighborhood of 1,000 to 1. Hartzell recruited local agents to canvass for donations, and demanded his own share of $2,500/week (more like $25,000 in today's terms). He then returned to England where he remained for the next eleven years.
Hartzell grew more and more inventive. Sir Francis Drake, it seemed, had had a third and secret marriage, resulting in a son. This son was Drake's true heir, and his descendent was declared to be a Colonel Drexel Drake living in London. Colonel Drexel Drake did not exist, but this did not stop Hartzell from claiming to be engaged to marry the colonel's (also nonexistent) niece. On the occasion of their fictitious engagement, the Colonel had signed over all interest in the Drake fortune to none other than Oscar Hartzell. Hartzell claimed he was also going to seek restitution from the British government, with interest, as Queen Elizabeth had originally grabbed more than her fair share of the treasure. Drake's secret 3rd wife had been Queen Elizabeth I herself. The current king was planning to sign over monies and properties to Hartzell, but was delayed by illness. The new Lord Chancellor reviewed the papers and found a small clerical error. There was panic at the Bank of England over the billions soon to be leaving British shores for America.
Cons of all kinds flourished in the boom of the 1920ies: scammers sold shares in the League of Nations, or in fictitious gold and platinum mines, land speculation, or fraudulent oil well ventures. People believed because there were so many true reports of others getting rich quick and they didn't want to be left behind. In the Midwest, the Drake Estate became a craze.
The 1929 stock-market crash put an end to most of the swindles that had been popular during the decade, but not the Drake scam. Somehow the faith of the Midwesterners in Hartzell was confirmed by the failure of Wall Street. Hartzell turned these details to his advantage: fear of the Drake Estate settlement had paralyzed financial institutions and caused the depression.
A scholarly article by John Maynard Keynes used an example of the original Drake fortune and how its investment by Queen Elizabeth I had led directly to England's becoming a world power. He meant it as an example of the power of compound interest over time, but "the Drakers" took it as validation.
Still living in England, Hartzell fell under the influence of a medium or fortune-teller, a Mrs. Nina St. John Montague. At the same time back home, he became the subject of a major investigation by U.S. postal inspector, John Sparks. Mail fraud cases were divided into "land swindles, oil well swindles, fake dog pedigree swindles, bogus work-at-home schemes, and bogus literary agencies; there were fake diploma rackets, astrology rackets, and fake prize contests. And so on...--including the category of genealogical swindles.
In January of 1933, Hartzell was deported from England, and returned (traveling in first class on a luxury ocean liner) to the U.S.. He was arrested as soon as the ship docked, and taken to Iowa to stand trial. The authorities wanted him, but the crowds of duped investors who gathered to cheer him on continued to believe in the Drake Estate as their way out. Oscar Hartzell had achieved the status of folk hero.
People attributed major diplomatic, political, and financial developments on the world stage to the imminent settlement of the Drake Estate. It was even claimed that all territory north of the Rio Grande and west of the Mississippi river would be included in the final settlement--based on the claim that Francis Drake had landed in what is now California and laid claim to the region. On the witness stand at Hartzell's fraud trial, one believer said, "Our deal is the cause of the depression, having tied up the finances of the whole world."
Hartzell was sentenced to 10 years in Leavenworth prison plus a $2,000 fine. When his appeals were finally exhausted in January of 1935, he was taken to prison. But Oscar's imprisonment barely made a dent in the continued progress of the scheme. People chose to believe that his imprisonment was unjust, or that it was a fake and he wasn't really in Leavenworth at all.
When the infamous "Drake Plaque" was discovered in Northern California the late 1930ies, it seemed to lend credence to the suggestion that California might be part of the Drake Estate. The plaque was an elaborate practical joke, but was widely considered to be a genuine artifact of Drake's visit to the west coast. People wrote to the State Department, to enquire if the plaque were connected with shares they'd bought in the Drake Estate deal. Californians had been buying these shares from a resurfaced Sudie Whittaker.
Hartzell assured the prison psychiatrists that the estate would be settled any day, and his innocence proven. He claimed he would officially be given the name "Sir Francis Drake." He was eventually diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Hartzell died in prison of throat cancer in 1943. But the legacy of the Drake Estate scam lives on in descendents such as the well-known internet "Nigerian scam".
The term "confidence man" was coined in 1848. Before then, the typical term for that sort of swindle was "diddling"--after a character named "Jeremy Diddler" in long-forgotten eponymous play. The art of the con man is to present the unreal as if it were truth. There has to be a certain plausibility to the tale, and delays and obstacles lend to the credibility as well as providing additional opportunities to ask for more money. Such swindles play upon greed, and the hope of something for nothing.
Back in 1591-1592, Robert Greene (who was also Shakespeare's first critic) wrote two pamphlets about "cony-catchers." "A Notable Discovery of Cosenage" was the longer of the two, in which the author detailed the methods of "the Fetcher, the Shifter, the Ruffler, the Prigger, the Cross-Biter, the nip, the Foist, and the Deceipts of their Doxies."
posted by Marlissa | 9:19 PM
