King Con Read online

  Persistent in his rejection of the life into which he’d been born, Edgar was still pretending to be the Onondagan athlete Tom Longboat when he reached San Diego on Thursday, March 8, 1917—three days after his solo show at the First Baptist Church. He found his way to the downtown stretch of Sixth Street, where he walked into the mahogany-swathed interior of the Hotel St. James and rented a room. Snazzy hotels like this were important to Edgar and his fellow grifters, who needed to mix with influential and well-heeled types. Eleven stories tall, the St. James rated among the city’s loftiest and most up-to-date structures. It even boasted a roof garden from which Edgar could survey the grid of chiefly low-rise blocks covering the shallow grade that angled toward San Diego Bay, numerous large steamships necklacing the waterfront.

  His first night at the St. James was spent befriending F. C. Dean, the hotel’s manager. Within seconds Edgar could beguile men and women alike with his smooth-talking charm, bantering humor, and counterfeit stardom. As was so often the case, this must have blinded Dean to the obvious flaw in Edgar’s Tom Longboat shtick. Though he presented himself as a famous Onondagan athlete, Edgar did not possess the facial characteristics of any indigenous North American people. His daring act of racial imposture was surely assisted by general ignorance of what those people looked like. Dean and many other white Americans probably had no memory of encountering them, no memory of seeing photos of them; just the memory, perhaps, of white actors playing them on-screen—white actors who lacked Edgar’s uncanny plausibility. For Dean and other white Americans, their prejudices nurtured by then-fashionable racial theories, much of that plausibility would have been due to the manifest illogic of a white American willfully trading places with a member of what was considered an inferior race. Edgar’s maybe unconscious masterstroke was to legitimize himself by displaying an authentic Onondagan’s eagerness to discredit those widespread misconceptions.

  Such were Edgar’s acting skills that he gave his new acquaintance the impression that his wartime experiences had left him craving “the milk of human kindness.” Later that evening, Dean obliged by taking him to an event at the nearby Maryland Hotel, where the light, sparsely appointed, pale mosaic–floored public rooms possessed a modernity absent from the St. James. Edgar and Dean hobnobbed there with the all-male membership of the local chapter of the Hotel Greeters of America, a group whose aim was to boost the hotel industry. Dean and the other members treated Edgar as a hero, the atmosphere of bonhomie likely abetted by alcohol. Further ingratiating himself with his host, Edgar presented Dean with a cane that was, he said, made from a spear used by a colonial soldier fighting in the British army.

  Probably at the Maryland that evening, Edgar ran into a journalist from the San Diego Union. By talking to the press, he’d render the locals more receptive to his scam, yet publicity increased the chances of his being caught. Risk and reward were one and the same for Edgar, though, because he was addicted to the attention that came from speaking with reporters, to the frisson of risk that accompanied it—risk that courted arrest and imprisonment.

  He told the journalist he was planning to settle in San Diego, where he’d arranged to meet his mother, who was heading west at that very moment. But he neglected to mention that any such reunion would require supernatural intervention, his mother having passed away more than a decade earlier. He said he was recuperating from a bayonet wound he’d sustained while serving in France. The wound had, he explained, put him “permanently out of the running game.” He also talked about fighting alongside the Canadian forces. And he spoke about wanting to rectify the common misapprehension that he was “a Canadian Indian.” He added that he’d been “born in New York State.” Weak though he claimed to be, he said, “If America goes to war with any nation, I am ready to donate my services to my own country.”

  For all his storytelling skills, which enabled him to pass off fiction as reality, he couldn’t hide the truth from himself. Behind his jaunty double-dealing lay a sorrowful recognition that no matter how hard he tried to be someone else, someone worthy of acclaim, he’d always be that no-good boy from Central Falls.

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  Inevitably assisted by his convivial evening with the Hotel Greeters, Edgar became a cherished fixture in the lounges, bars, and dining rooms of San Diego’s tonier hotels over the next few days. Swank establishments such as the Grant Hotel—where his debonair looks led swooning young women to declare that “he surely knew how to wear a dress suit”—gave him access to the affluent San Diegans who socialized there. He then lined up those hapless marks for the con artist’s quintessential sleight of mind, for the sad story of how he was “temporarily embarrassed by lack of funds,” a story that applied just the right amount of psychological pressure to ensure they insisted upon lending him money. Flimflam merchants like him accepted these loans only after a show of prideful reluctance.

  In search of extra leverage, he began saying he’d served in the trenches with Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, known as “the Princess Pat Regiment.” Almost wiped out at the Second Battle of Ypres, where it had fought a dogged but futile defense of its position, the unit was synonymous with military martyrdom. Edgar’s latest embellishment may have been inspired by a recent syndicated newspaper story about Lieutenant Sylvester Long Lance, a Carlisle graduate who happened to be one of the regiment’s few survivors. By attaching himself to that tragic tale, Edgar could exploit people’s desire for glory through association.

  Soon he was being pampered by a number of prominent citizens, including Judge George J. Leovy, the gray-mustached, pince-nez-wearing commodore of San Diego’s ritzy and very popular Yacht Club. Edgar also plied his trade at the city’s similarly exclusive Rowing Club, where he suckered two of the young bucks into wining and dining him. They even elected him as an honorary member. In return, he pledged to donate three Indian-style canoes to their club. The minute they started asking after the canoes, he would know his time in San Diego was drawing to a close and he’d have to skip town.

  “Hopscotching” from place to place—as grifters like Edgar termed this—was fundamental to his line of work. Whenever exposure loomed, he’d move elsewhere. It was a tactic rendered effective by the absence of national newspapers, by the lack of a countrywide radio or highway network, by the disconnectedness of the budding coast-to-coast law enforcement system, and by the inconvenience of long-distance phone calls, which could take upward of seven minutes to put through. Edgar also benefited from the mileage between the cities out west, mileage that conspired with poor communications to make those cities feel like remote islands. Each time the situation necessitated it, he could just go to a new place and begin afresh, debts and friendships casually shrugged off at a moment’s notice.

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  Colonel Joseph P. O’Neil invited Edgar—or, rather, he thought he was inviting Tom Longboat—to be guest of honor at San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition. The role carried such kudos that Edgar’s predecessor was the world-famous opera singer Nellie Melba, who had visited the exposition a few days before.

  Deep into its final month, the event, held to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal, represented the latest in a series of ostentatious displays of progress that had been staged in America and Europe over the previous sixty-five years. The exposition was spread across the abundant, rugged acreage of Balboa Park, not far from Edgar’s hotel. At the core of the event were a host of gargantuan, specially constructed Spanish-style buildings, which looked deceptively old. Their elegant towers and domes might have put Edgar in mind of Greater Dreamland, the oceanfront amusement park on Coney Island, where he’d worked seven summers earlier. But, unlike Coney Island that summer, Balboa Park had an off-season feel. Most of its buildings and their themed exhibitions had already closed. Tourists were nonetheless encouraged to wander around the surrounding courtyards, tropical gardens, and citrus groves.

/>   Edgar’s diminutive host commanded the Second Battalion of the Twenty-First Infantry Regiment, which had been staging parades and mock battles as part of the exposition. Colonel O’Neil and his officers were based in what people called the Indian Village—an imitation of a New Mexico or Arizona pueblo. Three terraced rows of houses appeared to have been cut into the rock face, homemade ladders connecting each level. Yet Edgar just needed to tap those rocks with his foot to understand that he was a sham Indian in a sham Indian Village. The rock face had been fabricated by laying cement over chicken wire. Until just a few months earlier, two hundred genuine, traditionally clothed Native Americans had been paid to live there.

  O’Neil acknowledged Edgar’s supposed record as a war veteran by giving him a U.S. Army uniform to wear at the exposition, where Edgar schmoozed with O’Neil and other officers. Like Nellie Melba before him, Edgar was asked to present the Stars and Stripes at the Twenty-First Infantry Regiment’s twice-weekly dress parade.

  Behind a marching band, O’Neil’s men conducted their complex drill on the huge expanse of asphalt that comprised the Plaza de Panama. All around Edgar and the parading soldiers were ornate architectural confections, each of which could have been plucked from some Spanish city. The parade culminated in Edgar presenting the flag, his latest escapade offering no more than temporary sustenance to the overpowering compulsions that drove him, compulsions destined to push him into ever more extreme scenarios.

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  From O’Neil, Edgar finagled a letter of recommendation. It was addressed to Lieutenant Robert Gross, the officer in charge of the USS Paul Jones, a destroyer berthed in San Diego Bay. Lieutenant Gross was fixing to recruit junior officers for the city’s newly formed naval reserve, established to patrol the harbor and neighboring shoreline. His recruitment campaign had attracted the interest of several people from the Yacht Club, where Edgar was a frequent guest of Judge Leovy.

  Always on the lookout for new ways of gratifying his unquenchable thirst for attention and status, Edgar applied to become a naval reservist. Judge Leovy’s son was among the other applicants. Before they could be enrolled, ready to commence training later that year, Edgar and the others had to go through a medical exam. Not that it presented any obstacle to him, because he was so fit. (While pretending to be Tom Longboat during a recent visit to an army training camp near the Mexican border, he’d validated all the stories about his athletic prowess by winning a one-mile race against a bunch of soldiers.) Predictably, he sailed through the reservists’ medical and joined ten other recruits for a ceremony aboard the USS Paul Jones. There, Edgar was assigned the rank of ensign, lowest position in the hierarchy of U.S. Navy officers.

  His fake identity as a famous athlete led to his recruitment triggering stories in newspapers on both coasts. A self-confessed “souvenir fiend,” who collected press clippings about himself, Edgar would surely have wanted a copy of the San Diego Union’s article about his enlistment. Edgar would have been able to obtain this from one of the local “newsies,” the typically homeless, grubby-faced boys aged between ten and fourteen who prowled the sidewalks hawking newspapers. “Although still suffering from a severe bayonet wound in the chest,” purred the article, “Longboat’s superb physique enabled him easily to pass the physical examinations.”

  Reading multiple newspapers each day was a ritual common to bunco artists like Edgar. It enabled them to stay abreast of topics that might facilitate conversations with potential marks. And sometimes it alerted them to lucrative opportunities, or kept them one jump ahead of the law.

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  That Wednesday—his sixth day in San Diego—Edgar paid another visit to Balboa Park. Not to the Plaza de Panama, but to the area abutting both the Indian Village and the encampment where the Twenty-First Infantry’s enlisted men lived. An audience of seven hundred soldiers had already gathered at the Tractor Demonstration Field, where an afternoon of entertainments was laid on to reward the regiment for its work.

  Edgar had cause to feel pleased with himself. In recognition of both his singing and the fame he’d pilfered from Tom Longboat, he would be appearing on the same bill as Carrie Jacobs-Bond, one of America’s preeminent singers. She’d even performed at the White House, though there was nothing starry about this homely, rheumatic fifty-four-year-old Midwesterner. By a happy coincidence, her hit song, “The End of a Perfect Day,” was part of Edgar’s repertoire, yet that day already threatened to end far from perfectly for him, thanks to concurrent developments in Toronto, hometown of the real Tom Longboat. News of an impostor pretending to be Tom and receiving a hero’s welcome in San José had reached the Toronto Telegram.

  Edgar would surely have known nothing about the potential trouble brewing north of the border while that afternoon’s entertainments got under way. These commenced with a series of boxing bouts, featuring what was presented as a comic brand of pugilism called a “battle royal.” Dating back to the days of slavery, these brutally dehumanizing contests entailed groups of anywhere between four and thirty blindfolded African American men swinging at one another until all but one of them had been bludgeoned into unconsciousness, the winner often collecting a meager purse. Battle royals were recurrent attractions at Jim Crow–era carnivals, fairs, and boxing shows. They were certainly familiar to Edgar. Over in Bisbee, Arizona, just a shade under seven weeks earlier, he’d shared the bill with a battle royal.

  Into the ring at the Tractor Demonstration Field stepped a good-looking African American boxer nicknamed Speedball. He’d lately been bragging about how he could lick any two men in town. Confronting him in the ring were not two but five other African Americans. By the end of the bout they were lying concussed at Speedball’s feet.

  Edgar had the unenviable task of going onstage immediately afterward and striving to capture the audience’s attention. Fortunately, he’d had plenty of practice at that sort of thing, not least when he’d worked as a “ballyhoo man” on Coney Island. Perched every afternoon and evening on a small stage outside Bostock’s Animal Arena, he’d been required to attract a crowd by any means. No sooner had he distracted people from the competing sights, sounds, and smells than he’d make way for the “barker” who began a shouted spiel designed to coax those people into the show. Edgar was consequently well-prepared almost seven years later for going onstage in front of the huge crowd of excited soldiers, fresh from yelling at Speedball and the other fighters. The soldiers were rapidly enthralled by Edgar’s rendition of a traditional Irish song.

  How a star athlete could perform with the virtuosity of a professional singer may have puzzled one or two of them. The answer was simple. He was a professional singer, who had worked in vaudeville, one of the country’s most popular forms of mass entertainment. Vaudeville performers like Edgar honed their ability to interact with audiences, banter with them, and swat hecklers with smart put-downs—skills that would surely have been tested by the crowd currently facing him. Singing loudly enough to be heard in the back rows of cavernous theaters was another of those skills.

  When Edgar finished belting out his closing number, its last line dispersing through the spring air, he received sufficient applause to justify an encore. He wound up providing further encores before finally handing over to Carrie Jacobs-Bond. She accompanied herself on the piano as she performed numbers from her lachrymose back catalog, their repeated emphasis on home and ultimate reunion apposite to her military audience. Once she’d finished the last of her songs, her place was taken by the exposition’s director, who praised the soldiers and thanked them for playing a part in its success. Much to their surprise, a commemorative medal was issued to each of them. With these pinned to their uniforms, they were treated to a performance by a Hispanic song-and-dance troupe. Meanwhile, a well-known Los Angeles chef barbecued generous quantities of beef. Soon the soldiers were waiting in line to have their cups filled with coffee and their plat
es heaped with meat, beans, tamales, and olives, as well as bread and butter.

  To this subsequently sated audience, Edgar made a speech urging the men to be careful at all times to uphold the dignity of their uniforms. His speech displayed an eloquence that flouted his paucity of schooling: “My people have buried the tomahawk and the hatchet and war paint, but they are ready to go to war with you boys and protect our Star-Spangled banner, if necessary.”

  Within hours of Edgar speaking those words in Balboa Park, a Morse code message from a journalist in Toronto was stuttering down the network of telegraph wires linking Canada with San José. Delivered to the offices of the San José Evening News, the message read:

  MAN POSING IN YOUR CITY IS FAKER. THE REAL TOM LONGBOAT IS NOW IN ENGLAND WITH A TORONTO BATTALION WHICH LEFT HERE ONLY FIVE MONTHS AGO. HE HAS NEVER BEEN TO FRANCE.

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  Edgar returned to Balboa Park at 1 p.m. the next day. Secretive about his true self yet garrulous and extroverted in the role he’d chosen, he socialized with his officer friends at the Indian Village. He couldn’t stay there long, however, because he had just ninety minutes to spare until he was scheduled to take the stage once again.

  To reach that afternoon’s concert venue, he had to saunter past a big open-air theater and some formal gardens. Beyond the huge façade of the Christobel Café, which advertised “cabaret and dancing,” were the grand entrances to a half-dozen other substantial buildings, all of them closed. Edgar then needed to cross the Plaza de Panama and head down a wide avenue leading to a smaller square, where big crowds assembled to listen to daily concerts. Before him was an almost semicircular Roman-style arcade. It bordered a wide stage that protruded from the base of Spreckels Organ Pavilion, which resembled the gatehouse to some colossal Spanish palace. Embedded within the pavilion’s central arch lay the world’s largest outdoor pipe-organ.