One of the most talented con artists who ever lived was Victor Lustig. Victor
had been born in Bohemia and gone west, demonstrating his talents even in his
early twenties. He was a natural conman, glib and charming in multiple
languages. He established himself by working scams on the ocean liners steaming
between Paris and New York, but eventually decided to stay in Paris for a while
and see what he could find there.
In 1925, France had recovered from the First World War and Paris was booming.
Expatriates from all over the world went to Paris to enjoy being at the leading
edge of the latest trends. It was flashy, fast moving, and an excellent
environment for a con artist.
Lustig's master con began one spring day when he was reading a newspaper. An
article discussed the problems the city was having maintaining the Eiffel Tower.
Even keeping it painted was an expensive chore, and the tower was becoming
somewhat run down.
Lustig saw a story behind this article. Maybe the city would decide the
Eiffel Tower wasn't worth saving any longer. What would happen then? Lustig
outlined the possibilities in his head, and realized they suggested a remarkable
scheme.
Lustig adopted the persona of a government official, and had a forger produce
fake government stationery for him. Lustig then sent six scrap metal dealers an
invitation to attend a confidential meeting at the Hotel Creon to discuss a
possible business deal. The Hotel Creon was a meeting place for diplomats and a
perfect cover. All six scrap dealers replied and came to the meeting.
There, Lustig introduced himself as the deputy director-general of the
Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs. He explained that the dealers had been
selected on the basis of their good reputations as honest businessmen, and then
dropped his bombshell.
Lustig told the group that the upkeep on the Eiffel Tower was so outrageous
that the city could not maintain it any longer, and wanted to sell it for scrap.
Due to the certain public outcry, he went on; the matter was to be kept secret
until all the details were thought out. Lustig said that he had been given the
responsibility to select the dealer to carry out the task.
The idea was not as implausible in 1925 as would be today. The Eiffel Tower
had been built for the 1889 Paris Exposition, and was not intended to be
permanent. It was to have been taken down in 1909 and moved someplace else. It
didn't fit with the city's other great monuments like the gothic cathedrals or
the Arc de Triomphe, and in any case at the time it really was in poor
condition.
Lustig took the men to the tower in a rented limousine to give them an
inspection tour. The tower was made of 15,000 prefabricated parts, many of which
were highly ornamental, and Lustig showed it off to the men. This encouraged
their enthusiasm, and it also gave Lustig an idea who was the most enthusiastic
and gullible. He knew how to be attentive and agreeable and let people talk
until they told him everything he wanted to know.
Back on the ground, Lustig asked for bids to be submitted the next day, and
reminded them that the matter was a state secret. In reality, Lustig already
knew he would accept the bid from one dealer, Andre Poisson. Poisson was
insecure, feeling he was not in the inner circles of the Parisian business
community, and thought that obtaining the Eiffel Tower deal would put him in the
big league. Lustig had quickly sensed Poisson's eagerness.
However, Lustig knew he was walking over dangerous ground. Fraud was bad
enough, but the authorities would be very displeased at his having put over the
fraud while impersonating a high government official. And Poisson's wife was
suspicious. Who was this official, why was everything so secret, and why was
everything being done so quickly?
To deal with the suspicious Poisson, Lustig arranged another meeting, and
then "confessed". As a government minister, Lustig said, he did not make enough
money to pursue the lifestyle he enjoyed, and needed to find ways to supplement
his income. This meant that his dealings needed a certain discretion.
Poisson understood immediately. He was dealing with another corrupt
government official who wanted a bribe. That put Poisson's mind at rest
immediately, since he was familiar with the type and had no problems dealing
with such people.
So Lustig not only received the funds for the Eiffel Tower 250,000 francs
(about a million dollars), he also got a
bribe on top of that. Lustig and his personal secretary, an American conman
named Dan Collins, hastily took a train for Vienna with a suitcase full of cash.
He knew the instant that Poisson called the government ministries to ask for
further information the whole fraud would be revealed and the law would
intervene.
Nothing happened. Poisson was too humiliated to complain to the police. A
month later, Lustig returned to Paris, selected six more scrap dealers, and
tried to sell the Eiffel Tower once more. This time, the mark went to the police
before Lustig managed to close the deal, but Lustig and Collins still managed to
evade arrest.
There were others who made a profit selling civic landmarks, of course. In
the early 1920s, a fast-talking Scotsman named Arthur Ferguson found out that he
could obtain a tidy profit by selling Americans visiting London such items as
Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square (for the sum of 6,000 pounds), Big Ben
(1,000 pounds for a down payment), and Buckingham Palace (2,000 pounds for a
down payment).
It finally dawned on Ferguson that America was indeed the land of
opportunity, and so he emigrated there in 1925. He sold the White House to a
rancher on the installment plan for yearly payments of $100,000 USD, and tried
to sell the Statue of Liberty to a visiting Australian, who went to the police.
The authorities had been looking for the mysterious salesman of public
landmarks, and Ferguson went to jail, to be released in 1930. He profitably
continued his trade in Los Angeles until his death in 1938.
Lustig, too, finally immigrated to the US, and conducted a number of scams.
Eventually his luck ran out. He was arrested for counterfeiting and sent to
Alcatraz Prison. He died in 1947. The clerk who filled out his death certificate
had to pause when he came to the entry titled OCCUPATION. He finally wrote:
SALESMAN.
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Charles Ponzi was a little Italian immigrant to the United States who became
one of the greatest swindlers in American history. Most people have never heard
of Ponzi, but the term "Ponzi Pyramid" is fairly well known, and even those who
haven't heard of that know about its modern version, the MAKE MONEY FAST schemes
that percolate through the Internet.
Parts of Charles Ponzi's life are hard to determine for certain, as Ponzi
himself was an incurable liar. He was born in Parma, Italy, in 1882, and
immigrated to the United States in 1903. He would later claim that he had been a
student at a university in Italy and decided to emigrate when he ran out of
money, but other accounts suggest he was an inept petty thief who always got
caught, and his family finally decided to get rid of him by shipping him across
the Atlantic.
Whatever the case, the new arrival was a short fellow, only 158 centimeters
(5 feet 2 inches) tall, but with boundless self-confidence, a big smile, and a
fast line of talk. However, Ponzi suffered from a severe mismatch between his
grand assessment of his own capabilities and his actual talents. He arrived in
the US almost penniless, having been cleaned out in card games during the voyage
across the ocean.
He was undiscouraged. He learned how to speak and read English, and got a job
as a dishwasher in a restaurant. He slept on the floor of the restaurant as he
had no other place to live, but managed to work his way up to the position of
waiter. Unfortunately, he shortchanged the customers and played games with the
bills, and so he was fired.
Ponzi was unfazed. In 1907, he moved to Montreal, Canada, and became an
assistant teller in a bank. Among his talents was a certain glib talent with
numbers, and he found out that the bank was in serious financial troubles
because of bad real-estate loans. He schemed to take over the bank, but was
caught forging checks in the name of an elderly woman who had a deposit at the
bank. This exercise got him three years in a Canadian prison.
He wrote his mother that he had found a job as a "special assistant" to a
prison warden. When he was released in 1911, he decided to return to the US, but
got involved in a scheme to smuggle Italian immigrants across the border. He was
caught and spent two years in an Atlanta prison.
When Ponzi was released he went to Boston. There he met and in 1918 married a
pretty, wide-eyed Italian girl named Rose Gnecco, who was swept off her feet by
Ponzi's sparkling charm. Some accounts claim that Ponzi was working at different
jobs and bumbling them, others that he was actually finding success with J.P.
Poole, an import company. In either case, he finally had a vision.
The vision was the "postal reply coupon". Early in the 20th century, the US
was full of immigrants who wanted to keep in touch with their families in the
old countries. However, many of these families were terribly poor, as Europe was
in desperate shape following the First World War. Very often the families were
hard-pressed to afford postage.
The postal reply coupon was a chit that the American son or daughter could
include with the letter, which could be redeemed at the local post office for
enough postage to allow the family to mail a letter back to the US. The scheme
was devised by an international postal congress in 1907 and persists today.
In November 1919, Ponzi realized that, on paper at least, international
trading of postal reply coupons could yield 400% returns. Essentially, he was
considering a form of "arbitrage", or currency trading, and perfectly legal in
itself.
Ponzi began to canvass his friends and associates to get backing for his
scheme. He offered them a 50% return on their money in 45 days, or double their
money in 90 days. The great returns available from postal reply coupons, he
explained to them, made such incredible profits easy. He started his own
company, the "Securities Exchange Company", to promote the scheme.
His sales pitch was smooth and low-key. He managed to get a few investors,
and paid them off as he had promised. The word spread, and investors began to
come in the door at an increasing rate. He hired agents and paid them generous
commissions for every dollar they brought in. By February 1920, Ponzi's total
take was $5,000 USD, a tidy sum for the time. That was just the beginning.
By March, he was up to $30,000 USD. Frenzy was building, and Ponzi began to
hire agents to take in money from all over New England and New Jersey. If
investors were doubtful, he would overwhelm them with his line of talk. By
throwing numbers at people, he could make their eyes glaze over and passively go
along with the game.
By May 1920, he was up to $420,000 USD. He began depositing the money in the
Hanover Trust Bank, in hopes that once his account was large enough he could
impose his will on the bank or even be made its president. He in fact managed to
get a controlling interest in the bank.
By July 1920, he was up to millions. Widows were mortgaging their homes;
people were taking their life savings to invest with the clever Ponzi. Most did
not collect their interest, but reinvested.
Ponzi was bringing in cash at a fantastic rate, but the simplest financial
analysis showed that he wasn't making money, he was losing it rapidly. For every
dollar he took in, he went more deeply into debt. As long as money kept flowing
in, he could stay one step ahead of the devil. If the cash flow faltered, the
pyramid would collapse and take him to Hell with it.
Ponzi was in a fool's paradise. He bought a mansion with air
conditioning and a heated pool, and brought his mother from Italy in a
first-class stateroom on an ocean liner. He was a hero among the Italian
community, and was cheered wherever he went.
The devil was gaining on him, however. A furniture dealer who had given Ponzi
furniture when the little Italian was broke tried to sue to cash in on the gold
rush. It was a nuisance lawsuit and went nowhere, but it did start people asking
how Ponzi could have gone from being broke to being a millionaire in so short a
time. There was a run on the Securities Exchange Company as some investors
decided to pull out.
Ponzi paid them cheerfully and the run stopped. In fact, on 24 July 1920, the
BOSTON POST printed a positive article on Ponzi and his scheme that sent
investors into the offices of the Securities Exchange Company at a faster rate
than ever. At that time, Ponzi was pulling in a quarter of a million dollars a
day.
Despite this reprieve, one of the editors of the POST was suspicious and
assigned investigative reporters to check out Ponzi. Ponzi was also under
investigation by the state of Massachusetts, and on the same day the POST
article was printed, he met with state officials. He managed to divert them from
checking his books, which was fortunate because he wasn't keeping any worthy of
the name, by offering to stop taking in money while he was being audited. This
calmed the suspicions of the state officials for the moment.
By this time, Ponzi was casting about for another deal to get him out of the
golden trap he was building for himself, but time was running out. On 26 July,
the POST started a series of articles that asked hard questions about the
operation of Ponzi's money machine. The POST contacted Clarence Barron, the
financial analyst who published the BARRON'S financial paper, to examine Ponzi's
scheme. Barron observed that though Ponzi was offering fantastic returns on
investments, Ponzi himself wasn't investing with his own company. If this was
such a good deal, why didn't Ponzi take advantage of it himself?
Barron then noted that to cover the investments made with the Securities
Exchange Company, there would have to be about 160,000,000 postal reply coupons
in circulation. There were only about 27,000. The US Postal Service added that
nobody was buying postal reply coupons in quantity at home or abroad. On paper,
there were fantastic profits in trading postal reply coupons, but they were a
penny item. The overhead required to handle the trades would have eaten up the
profits quickly.
The stories caused a panic run on the Securities Exchange Company. Ponzi paid
out $2 million USD in three days to a wild crowd outside his office. He
canvassed the crowd, passed out coffee and donuts, and cheerfully told them they
had nothing to worry about. Many changed their minds and left their money with
him.
There was something clueless in Ponzi's cleverness. He had set a scheme in
motion that was sure to collapse sooner or later. He was pulling in a pile of
cash, but only at the expense of going into even greater debt. At some point,
the sensible thing to do would be to take the money and run to someplace where
the law couldn't get at him.
Instead, he stayed with it. The only reason that makes any sense is that he
thought he could use the fortune he was accumulating to come up with a new
scheme that would save him. He could figure out some way of diverting the
fortune and the debt into a legitimate line of business, or maybe he could just
hire lawyers and judges and buy his way out of trouble.
On 2 August, the BOSTON POST ran a headline story that declared Ponzi was
hopelessly insolvent, and cited Ponzi's own publicity agent, James McMasters,
who was too honest to go along with the crooked scheme. On 10 August, Federal
agents raided the Securities Exchange Commission and shut Ponzi down. No large
stock of postal reply coupons was found, and never would be. The Hanover Trust
Bank would be shut down presently as well.
The POST continued their articles, with one revealing Ponzi's jail record and
publishing his (smiling) Canadian mug shots. By 13 August, Ponzi was under
arrest, with a Federal indictment citing 86 counts of fraud. Ponzi's fans were
outraged at the officers who arrested him. 17,000 people had invested millions,
maybe tens of millions, with Ponzi. Many who were ruined were so blinded by
their faith in the man or their refusal to admit their foolishness that they
still regarded him as a hero.
On 1 November 1920, Ponzi pleaded guilty to postal fraud, and was sentenced
to five years in Federal prison. He was released after three and a half years to
face state charges. He was found guilty again and sentenced to nine years. He
jumped bail and fled to Florida, where he set up a scam to sell "prime Florida
property" to gullible investors.
Florida authorities got wise to Ponzi quickly. He fled to Texas, where he
shaved his head, grew a mustache, and tried to flee the country as a crewman on
a merchant ship. He was caught and sent back to Massachusetts to serve out his
prison term.
In the meantime, government investigators tried to trace through Ponzi's
convoluted accounts to figure out how much money he had taken in and where it
had gone. They never did manage to untangle it, and could only conclude that
millions had gone through his hands.
Ponzi was released in 1934. The flashy cockiness that had kept him afloat had
faded by that time, and when he left the prison gates he was met by an angry
crowd. Furthermore, he had never become an American citizen, and so the US
government deported him back to Italy immediately. He told reporters before he
left: "I went looking for trouble, and I found it." Rose stayed behind. She
would divorce him presently.
In Italy, Ponzi jumped from scheme to scheme but little came of them. He
eventually got a cozy job as the agent for the Italian state airline in Brazil,
but during World War II, the Brazilians, who had signed up with the Allies,
realized the Italians were using the airline to ship strategic materials and
shut it down.
Charles Ponzi spent the last years of his life in poverty. He had a stroke in
1948, and died in a charity hospital in Rio de Janeiro on 18 January 1949. His
life had been characterized by one great moment of glory surrounded by failures.
Ponzi commented about the wild ride he had given Bostonians: "Even if they never
got anything for it, it was cheap at that price. Without malice aforethought I
had given them the best show that was ever staged in their territory since the
landing of the Pilgrims! It was easily worth fifteen million bucks to watch me
put the thing over!"
Although pyramid schemes were nothing new when Ponzi discovered postal reply
coupons, his scam was indeed one of the great shows in the history of fraud. He
would have also been gratified to know that from that time on, the old game of
borrowing from Peter to pay Paul on a massive scale would be known as a Ponzi
scheme.
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Medical quackery has always been a profitable hunting ground for conmen.
Electricity was a good hook to draw in the gullible, as it had long been
regarded as something of an elemental life-force. After all, it could make
disembodied frog's legs move. Mary Shelley's novel FRANKENSTEIN, published in
1818, reflected this impression by having Dr. Frankenstein's patchwork monster
brought to life by electricity.
In 1795, an American doctor from Connecticut named Elisha Perkins developed
what he called the "Perkins Patent Tractors", which were a pair of rods, one
made of iron and one made of brass, that could be used to draw out disease and
pain by passing them over one's body. The Connecticut Medical Society loudly
condemned the tractors as "delusive quackery", which was saying something
considering the medical standards of the time, but the tractors proved popular,
and even George Washington bought a set.
Elisha Perkins died of yellow fever in an epidemic in 1799. He may have
actually believed in the value of his tractors, though it appears they didn't
help much with yellow fever, but his son Benjamin Perkins was clearly a greedier
sort, who amassed quite a fortune with the tractors as well as more legitimate
business ventures before he died in 1810.
The practice of "tractoration", as it was known, did not live much longer
than Benjamin Perkins. Attempts to use tractors in veterinary medicine failed,
since animals tend to be more resistant to powers of suggestion than humans and
have not the least faith in placebos. Two medical practitioners named Hygarth
and Falconer administered the lethal blow to the practice by building duplicates
made out of wood that proved every bit as effective.
The Perkins tractors were only faintly electrical in nature, but they led to
further interesting medical technologies, such as electric belts and corsets,
which incorporated batteries and were in principle able to cure a wide range of
ills. They were used through the 19th century and into the 20th, and as late as
1927 a California huckster named Gaylord Wilshire was bringing in the bucks with
an AC-powered belt named the I-ON-A-CO.
Incidentally, magnets were also used as elements in cure-all gear, and when
radium was discovered late in the 19th century it was actually incorporated into
oral medicines, with documented cases of horrifying results.
The plausibility of electrical techno-cures was enhanced by the fact that
electrical machinery was actually being put into practical use in medicine.
Electrocautery machines proved much more effective than hot irons and other
primitive cauterization tools, for example, and in the 20th century all types of
valuable medical electronic instruments were developed.
However, as the scope of medical electronics widened, so did the scope of
medical electronic frauds. The king of all the medical quacks was Dr. Albert
Abrams of San Francisco. Nobody ever approached Dr. Abrams for audacity, and few
ever enjoyed such great success.
Dr. Abrams had one of the traits of a good con artist: he looked real. His
credentials were excellent. Born in San Francisco in 1863, he had received a
medical degree from the University of Heidelberg while he was still a teenager;
he had been chief pathologist at the Cooper Medical Institute, later the
Stanford Medical School; and in 1893 had been president of the San Francisco
Medical-Surgical Society. He was regarded as a guru by other doctors in the
city, and had published many articles in prominent medical journals. His
patients were the rich and powerful, and he was a member of San Francisco's
social elite.
Exactly why a reputable and successful physician like Dr. Abrams turned to
the "dark side" is hard to understand. His letters hint at a degree of
megalomania, a desire to obtain stature at any cost, or maybe it was just simple
greed.
During the First World War, Abrams promoted a theory that electrons were the
basic element of all life. He called his theory ERA, for "Electronic Reactions
of Abrams", an egocentric designation that lends some credence to the
megalomania hypothesis.
Abrams introduced a number of different machines that operated on the
principles of ERA. One of the most important was the "Dynomizer" that could
diagnose any known disease from a single drop of blood. Sometimes it appears to
have involved using a healthy subject as a reference, with the blood sample
"polarized" by a magnet before being inserted into the machine, which would then
sense the frequencies of the vibrations.
By the way, the blood didn't have to be very fresh. Abrams performed
diagnoses on dried blood samples sent to him on pieces of paper in envelopes
through the mail. Apparently Abrams even claimed he could conduct medical
practice over the telephone with his machines, and that he could also determine
personality characteristics.
The Dynomizer looked something like a radio, and it was not too much of a
stretch to believe that if a radio could tune in distant radio communications, a
similar device could interpret the electrical signals of the body.
Well ... OK, it was a pretty big stretch, but it might have been more
believable in the days when radio was new and mysterious, and making a
connection between the two technologies a clever touch on Abrams' part. Abrams
also built his devices to look very pretty, with fine hardwood cabinets and
high-quality accessories.
The Dynomizer was big business by 1918, and then Abrams decided to take the
next step. Diagnosing a disease was more or less a one-time operation, but
treating a disease, particularly one not strongly based in reality, required
repeated treatments. Abrams came up with a new and even more impressive gadget,
the "Oscilloclast", apparently also known as the "Radioclast". It came with
tables of frequencies that it was to be set to that allowed it to attack
specific diseases.
The Dynomizer tended to give very alarming diagnoses, involving combinations
of such maladies as cancer, diabetes, and syphilis. Abrams often included a
disease called "bovine syphilis", which mystified proper medical practitioners
since they had no idea what it was. Of course, the Oscilloclast was capable of
defeating most of these diseases. It didn't always get them all, but of course
no machine was perfect, not even the Oscilloclast.
Students flocked to Abrams' San Francisco clinic for training courses at $200
USD a head, a goodly sum at the time, and then leased the good doctor's
marvelous devices to take back home. It appears that Abrams developed quite a
range of different devices besides the Dynomizer and Oscilloclast to service the
demand for ERA technology. The rules specified that the boxes could not be
opened, as it might disrupt their delicate adjustments.
By 1921, there were 3,500 practitioners using ERA technology. Conventional
medical practitioners were extremely suspicious, not merely because they doubted
ERA was for real and thought it likely to lead to disasters, but because ERA
practitioners were cutting into their business.
In 1923, disaster happened. An old man who was diagnosed in the Mayo Clinic
with inoperable stomach cancer went to an ERA practitioner, who declared him
"completely cured" after treatments. The man died a month later, and uproar
followed. The war between Abrams and his followers and the American Medical
Association (AMA) went into high gear.
Defenders included American radical author Upton Sinclair, and the creator of
Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It must be noted in this context that
Conan Doyle was notoriously gullible. He believed in fairies, accepting as
evidence laughably faked photographs, and Harry Houdini commented after meeting
him that Conan Doyle was absolutely astounded at novice-level sleight-of-hand
tricks.
The only way the dispute could be resolved was through the intervention of a
scientifically respected third party. SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN magazine, a well
established and prestigious publication for decades, decided to investigate Dr.
Abrams' claims. SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN also a perfectly impartial reason to be
interested in the matter, since readers were writing letters to the editor and
saying that Abrams' revolutionary machines were one of the greatest inventions
of the century and so needed to be discussed in the pages of the magazine.
What was the truth? Was Abrams a genius, as his partisans claimed, or a
fraud, as the AMA claimed? SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN assembled a team of investigators
who worked with a senior Abrams apostle named "Doctor X" to find out the truth.
The investigators developed a series of tests, and the magazine asked readers to
suggest their own tests, another measure indicating the publication's
impartiality.
The investigators gave Doctor X six vials containing unknown pathogens and
asked him to verify what they might be. It seems likely that Doctor X honestly
believed in his Abrams machines, since he wouldn't have agreed to cooperate if
he hadn't, and in fact he allowed the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN investigators to
observe his procedure.
He got the contents of all six vials completely wrong. He examined the vials
and pointed out that they had labels in red ink, whose vibrations confounded the
instruments. The investigators gave him the vials again with less offensive
labels, and he still got the contents all wrong.
The results were published in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, and led to a predictable
"flame war" in the letters pages of the magazine between advocates and critics.
The investigators continued their work. Abrams offered to "cooperate" with the
investigators, but he always begged off when they stipulated conditions he
didn't like. Abrams never actually participated in the investigation, and in
fact in ERA publications he tried to paint himself as a victim of unjust
persecution.
Then an AMA member sent a blood sample to an Abrams practitioner, and got
back a diagnosis that the patient had malaria; diabetes; cancer; and of course
syphilis, presumably bovine syphilis. Actually, the blood sample was from a Rock
rooster.
Similar tricks were played on other Abrams practitioners, and a few found
themselves facing fraud charges in court. This was what the critics had been
waiting for, since in a case in Jonesboro, Arkansas, Dr. Albert Abrams was
called to be the star witness. Dr. Abrams managed to avoid appearing in court,
however, by the effective if somewhat drastic measure of dying of pneumonia at
age 62 in January 1924. The fact that his machines hadn't been able to cure him
was not lost on the critics.
With Dr. Abrams gone, the AMA then publicly opened up one of his machines.
Its internals consisted of nothing more than wires connected to lights and
buzzers and so on. It was a prop, and it wasn't very a very good prop at that.
It was clear that Dr. Abrams was a deliberate fraud.
The fad was over, but as long as there was a buck to be made, other people
moved into the vacuum and built devices based on similar principles, such as
they were. None would achieve the remarkable stature of those of Dr. Albert
Abrams, who the AMA said "easily ranked as the dean of twentieth-century
charlatans."
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Although Lustig and Abrams were clearly scoundrels, the greatest art conman
of all time, Han van Meegeren, ended up being a hero. He'd never planned on
being a hero, but he cheated all the right people at the right times.
Van Meegeren's life was linked to that of the great Dutch painter Johannes
Vermeer, who died in 1675. Vermeer had not been particularly famous until around
the beginning of the 20th century, and only about 40 of his works had survived.
At the end of the Second World War, the Allies came upon a salt mine in
Austria where the top Nazis had hidden works of art they had plundered from the
occupied countries of the Reich. The military brought in art experts to ensure
that the treasures were properly handled, identified, and repatriated. Among the
treasures were artworks from the collection of Nazi Reichsmarshall Hermann
Goering. Goering's collection included a Vermeer that none of the experts were
familiar with, and investigation traced it back to a Dutch citizen who was
running a nightclub in Amsterdam named Han van Meegeren.
The Dutch authorities pegged him as a collaborator when he could not explain
the origins of the Vermeer, and arrested him in May 1945. Van Meegeren was
potentially in very serious trouble, as he could be charged with treason, which
carried the death penalty. After several days of intense interrogation, he told
them the authorities the truth, which they did not believe at first: He had
painted the Vermeer himself.
Exactly how van Meegeren became a fraud is an interesting story, because he
didn't do it for the money, at least not at first. He had been born in Holland
in 1889, and had developed skills as a painter and a strong interest in the
Dutch classic painters. His father violently opposed his work as a painter, but
Han van Meegeren had a passion for it and could not be swayed from his life's
work.
Still, he had chosen a difficult path. He had turned away from modern art and
there was no way he could achieve recognition painting in the styles that were
popular centuries earlier. He was belittled by the critics to the extent that he
could no longer exhibit his work.
Van Meegeren thought the local art critics were mean and ignorant, and he
decided to prove it by publicly embarrassing them. Van Meegeren was intimately
familiar with the painting techniques of the Dutch masters, and decided to
produce a fake Vermeer. He would let the art critics praise it, and then reveal
that it was a fraud, proving their ignorance. His specific target was Dr.
Abraham Bredius, who was a recognized authority on Vermeer and who van Meegeren
particularly despised.
Van Meegeren was a painstakingly methodical forger. The painting not only had
to be executed in Vermeer's style and skill, it had to look ancient as well. Van
Meegeren found a 17th-century canvas to paint on, created his own paints from
raw materials by old formulas to ensure that they were authentic, and used the
same kind of brushes that Vermeer was known to have used. He came up with a
scheme of using phenol and formaldehyde to cause the paints to harden after
application, as if they were centuries old. After completing the painting, he
baked it to dry it out completely, rolled it over a drum to crackle it a bit,
and later washed it in black ink to fill in the cracks.
It took van Meegeren several years to work out his techniques, and when he
was done he was pleased with his work. It wasn't just that he thought it was a
convincing fraud. He had always wanted to walk in the steps of the masters, and
he felt that his forgery, CHRIST AT EMMAUS, was a fine work in its own right.
Van Meegeren put his fraud in motion, and Dr. Bredius was completely taken
in, just as van Meegeren had hoped. The Dutch art establishment was completely
fooled as well, though when the painting was shown in Paris one perceptive or
possibly merely cynical critic called it a "rotten fake".
Van Meegeren was enjoying this wild ride, but it was only starting. He wanted
to reveal the fraud, but when he sold the fake Vermeer for the equivalent of
what would now be several million dollars, he unsurprisingly had second
thoughts. He had proven to his own satisfaction that the Dutch art establishment
was ignorant, and that would have to do as long as he could make good money.
Between 1938 and 1945, he produced six more fake Vermeers, as well as fakes
of works by Frans Hals as Pieter de Hooch. It would seem that people would have
become suspicious after a while, but with the distractions of the war and Nazi
occupation van Meegeren was able to continue his activities essentially
unmolested. Since there was an active and secretive trade in artwork anyway
during the occupation, his fakes could ride along with the process as parasites.
One of van Meegeren's forgeries was sold in 1942 for the 1.6 million Dutch
guilders, making it one of the most expensive paintings ever sold. The last of
van Meegeren's fakes was CHRIST WITH THE ADULTRESS, which changed hands a number
of times and finally ended up in the collection of Reichsmarshall Goering, who
handed over an outrageous sum for it. Goering wasn't too concerned about the
money, however, since he paid in counterfeit currency.
CHRIST WITH THE ADULTRESS was found in the Austrian salt mine by Allied
forces, and led to van Meegeren's arrest. When he told the police that it was a
forgery, they didn't believe him, and challenged him to show he could paint a
copy of one of the supposed fakes. He replied that he could create an entirely
new fake.
He was put under house arrest, and in three weeks he painted a new forgery,
THE YOUNG CHRIST TEACHING IN THE TEMPLE, under the eyes of undoubtedly
flabbergasted police. The story got into the press and attracted worldwide media
attention. The charge was changed to one of forgery. In the week before the
trial, a poll showed he was the second most popular man in the Netherlands,
after the prime minister.
The trial began on 29 October 1947. Van Meegeren, then 58 and in failing
health, was delighted with the show and the media attention. He really wanted to
be found guilty, simply as confirmation that he was a master forger. The art
experts didn't want to testify, since it would confirm they had been duped, but
a committee was put together to investigate the forgeries.
Van Meegeren knew his paintings would be X-rayed to see what was painted on
the old canvas underneath, and he told the committee what they would find. They
did so, and after only two days on trial, van Meegeren was found guilty of
forgery. He was sentenced to two years in prison.
His health was so bad, however, that he went to a clinic instead of prison.
He died on 29 December 1947. Although van Meegeren may have not been much of a
role model, he had walked in the steps of the Dutch masters as he had always
wanted to do; made a fortune for himself in trying times; made fools of the art
establishment that had reviled him, and who nobody else liked; even tricked the
Nazis; become an international celebrity and a national hero of sorts; and then
made an exit effectively unscathed. All in all, a person could do a hell of a
lot worse.
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