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  When he and Milania were reunited at the villa in Fiumicello, he must have known this was likely to be his final visit. He had good cause to cherish memories of the experiences he’d enjoyed since he’d first stayed there some five months earlier. Over that period, he had amassed a treasured collection of photos, fan letters, and other keepsakes. The photos included autographed portraits of Italian dignitaries such as Gabriele D’Annunzio and Major General Sante Ceccherini. The latter’s picture bore the inscription “To His Highness Chief White Elk, noble Italian soul.”

  But Edgar’s current visit to Fiumicello didn’t go the way he might have hoped. It wound up being soured by the arrival of Georg, fresh from calling at the bank in Trieste and being informed once more that his family’s account was empty. Shock and distress coloring his demeanor, Georg confronted Milania and Atta. He wanted to know where the money had gone, though he must’ve had his suspicions. Edgar was now only a phone call away from becoming the target of an Italian police investigation.

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  What happened next seemed to corroborate the belief that giving money to beggars brought good luck to the giver. Instead of sharing her concerns about Chief White Elk, Milania told Georg there was nothing to worry about. She and Atta stressed the chief’s honesty and said the money had only been lent to him on a short-term basis. Yet Edgar must have realized that Georg would be less than forgiving when the December 28 deadline—now a little under ten weeks away—passed without the promised repayment. At that point even Milania and Atta would surely get wise to the massive swindle perpetrated against them.

  Putting some distance between himself and the Khevenhüller-Metsch family, Edgar recommenced his Italian tour by traveling to Turin, a modern, industrial city that had the attraction for him of being conveniently close to the Swiss border. He then moved into the fanciest midtown hotel, set in a rectilinear street pattern.

  Edgar began holding court at his hotel in a manner appropriate for a visiting monarch. His aura of authority was promoted not only by the attentive and ubiquitous presence of Angelo Birenzi and two of the other Venetian fascists, but also by the large black ring he proudly displayed. He’d tell people it had been presented to him by Il Duce. In truth, the ring—which resembled a famous item of jewelry worn by Mussolini—was just a cheap lookalike, given to Edgar by a Florentine admirer. The word “cheap” could not, however, be applied to the wreath that Edgar, in a well-practiced bid for statesmanlike gravitas, made a point of laying at the local war cemetery.

  Happy to accept the florid fiction he was peddling, the city embraced Edgar with familiar zeal over the next several days. Newspapers fêted him. The military assigned him a guard of honor. Photographers took his picture. Aristocratic families were drawn into his orbit. Honorary memberships of organizations such as the regional association of disabled war veterans were bestowed upon him. And fan mail was sent to him, each letter, each photograph, each certificate, each fawning accolade furnishing tangible affirmation of the vast scale on which he’d reshaped reality to suit his self-image.

  One of the letters was from Mussolini’s Musketeers, the prime minister’s troop of unpaid bodyguards. With the letter, they enclosed a ceremonial dagger. “To His Excellency Chief Elk Tewanna, drunk with joy and enthusiasm, we have in our hearts the faith to drown our hate and revenge in the blood of our adversaries,” the accompanying message read. “We offer our symbol, our dagger.”

  Invitations to the usual receptions and other official functions came his way, too. Thus he spent an evening at the city’s Trianon Theater, where a grand gala was being held to celebrate the second anniversary of the March on Rome. Not wanting to waste such a good opportunity to show off, he procured a spot on the roster of speakers. He was asked by the organizers to come in full costume and to wear his ceremonial dagger. Rounding off his outfit was a gaudy selection of necklaces and pendants.

  His speech, venerating Mussolini, was delivered in a persuasive replica of impassioned sincerity. When he proceeded to castigate Il Duce’s opponents, he underscored the speech with a touch of professional stagecraft by brandishing a knife and saying that “represented the best medicine for traitors to their homeland.”

  The audience responded with fervent approval.

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  In the recent past he’d have endorsed his spurious credentials as a Native American prince and a supporter of Mussolini by making a hefty donation to the PNF, but he could no longer afford that. His habitual profligacy had ensured that he could now only distribute alcohol-scented promises of future donations, because little remained of the seven to eight thousand lire he’d possessed when he arrived in Turin.

  Georg had been exaggerating when he’d accused Edgar of borrowing the entire Khevenhüller-Metsch fortune, yet Edgar was reluctant to ask for more money—a request that would only hasten the impending trouble. His already precarious relationship with the family hadn’t been helped by the letter he received from Atta, who had heard about him referring to her as his fiancée. “You hurt my feelings because I care about my honor,” she scolded him.

  As if he didn’t have enough to contend with, he was taken sick with abdominal pains and another high fever. He nonetheless smuggled his souvenir collection out of his hotel, where he’d run up a massive bill. Quitting the hotel without paying what he owed, his failure to settle this debt probably contributing to the sudden removal of his honor guard, he was admitted to the private San Vito Hospital, southeast of the city. There, he was cared for by a nursing staff of nuns, the sight of whom may have been sufficient to send childhood recollections of Catholic parochial school wafting through his fever-stricken mind. Physicians at the hospital subsequently diagnosed the source of his condition as syphilitic hepatitis, a rare yet treatable manifestation of secondary syphilis.

  * * *

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  Whispers about him had reached Milania. Not about his true identity, his criminal past, or the reason for his hospitalization. Instead, the talk concerned his excessive spending, about which she’d previously reproached him. Yet when he contacted her from the hospital, clearly angling for help with the cost of his medical treatment, she assured him that she’d be glad to pick up the tab.

  Even though Dr. Angelo Viziano, one of the physicians at the hospital, spent a full night taking care of him, Edgar wrote a letter to Atta, beefing about the treatment he was receiving and about how cold the place was. Anything short of deluxe accommodation was these days insufficient for the self-styled prince.

  “Please don’t criticize the hospital where you’re being looked after with great devotion. It’s the only place where you’d be taken in without payment,” Atta chided him in her reply, which went on to display a belated psychological insight into his personality. “You don’t treat real friends the way they deserve, real friends being people who aren’t interested in what you can do for them. You only value those who suck your blood.”

  Afforded time to brood on his predicament, Edgar’s characteristic nonchalance was replaced by an air of desperation, surely aggravated by his present feverish state. When Atta swung by the hospital in early November, bringing him a selection of edible treats, she asked for him to be dosed with something to calm him down, because she feared he might attempt suicide. She also asked the hospital authorities to place him under observation.

  Her stepmother, who shared her concern for Edgar’s well-being, visited the hospital, too. Edgar introduced Milania as his aunt. Milania felt sorry enough for him to pay ten thousand lire to cover his hospital bill. She also handed over another large loan. And she gave him a couple of warm topcoats to keep out the wintry chill fast engulfing that part of the country. She even had him transferred to his own private room on the top floor. When he began to recover, Milania expressed her gratitude to Dr. Viziano with the gift of an expensive cigarette case, along with a hair clip for the doctor’s sister.


  Among the hospital staff, Edgar had become such a celebrity that he put on his chief’s outfit and posed for a group photo with them. Further validation of the enduring strength of his assumed identity came in the form of a letter from the bishop of Trieste, to whom he’d earlier promised a donation. “I regret I have just learned that Your Highness is ill,” the bishop wrote, “and I will pray for a speedy recovery.”

  Lying in bed, Edgar was often surrounded by well-known locals, who included his former secretary, Count Ludovico Barattieri. The current incumbent of that post, Angelo Birenzi, came to see him as well, though Birenzi’s time at his bedside was truncated by the arrival of the police.

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  Edgar must have been both surprised and relieved that the police didn’t arrest him. They served a warrant against Birenzi instead. For all Edgar’s previous assurances about using diplomatic channels to get the case dropped, Birenzi was charged with complicity in the attack on the vaporetto driver. Led away in handcuffs, Birenzi had an opportunity to reflect upon the worthlessness of Edgar’s promises.

  Someone with even more reason to do that was, of course, Milania, whose faith in Edgar was finally beginning to ebb. Under pressure from Georg, who seems to have persuaded her that the chief had made a bad business decision by spending more than a million lire on forcing the British government to release the same amount, she asked a Turin attorney to contact him. The attorney informed Edgar that she was growing apprehensive about the money he owed her. Consequently, the attorney requested a formal document acknowledging the debt.

  But Edgar ignored the request, and tried to fob Milania off with a set of expensively produced photographic portraits of himself. She employed these as the pretext for a thank-you letter in which she wrote, “I certainly have faith in you, Chief.” Then she added, “Do not forget to write to me and send the document that has been requested from you.” She endeavored to make this seem casual by referring to how such a document was “normal even among relatives.” Georg had suggested it, she explained, because it was in everyone’s best interests. She added that it was necessary in order to give her priority during the financial settlement accompanying Edgar’s planned divorce.

  Though she signed her letter “with love,” Edgar must have realized he’d struggle to chisel any more loans out of Milania, who had arrived at the painful realization that he only contacted her when he needed money, which he then frittered away. “I do hope you are not going to spend any more money because, by doing so, you’re going to ruin yourself and us,” she cautioned.

  Edgar kept her dangling for going on two weeks before mailing her a letter confirming that he owed her more than a million lire—well over double the jackpot in the Italian national lottery. Alcoholic bravado sweeping him across the frontier between the risky and the downright reckless, he promised that his debt would be settled by Sunday, January 25, 1925, at the latest. On top of the capital repayment, he generously pledged 6 percent interest, his generosity facilitated by the knowledge that he’d never have to hand over the money.

  His bid to placate Milania and family was, however, put in severe jeopardy by the next day’s edition of the Turin newspaper Gazzetta del Popolo. It carried a piece headlined THE TRUTH ABOUT THE REDSKIN PRINCE.

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  The piece about Edgar that appeared in Gazzetta del Popolo tagged him as an impostor, though it otherwise mirrored his sketchy relationship to the facts. He was portrayed as someone who had acted in hit movies such as The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and who had directed The Covered Wagon. His work in the movies had purportedly enabled him to imitate “the customs, habits and rituals” of Native Americans. To minimize any loss of public trust in the PNF, which was so closely associated with him, the newspaper informed its readers that previous stories about Chief White Elk being awarded honorary membership in numerous chapters of the party were just a product of his fantasies.

  Milania and Atta can’t have been aware of the article, because they clung to the regal fiction Edgar had wrought. Their residual faith in him even survived his failure to reply to their recent letters—something that may have motivated Atta’s next visit to San Vito Hospital. About that time, Edgar proposed marriage to her, seemingly as a means of ensuring she remained on his side.

  She accepted the engagement ring that came with his proposal. From both a romantic and a pragmatic point of view, it made sense for her. If everything he said about his Canadian assets were true, becoming his wife would provide a boost for her in terms of finance and status.

  Brimming with pride, he presented his fiancée—the glamorous Contessa Antoinette Khevenhüller-Metsch—to Dr. Viziano. The doctor appears to have taken this as the cue to warn Atta about the Turin police’s planned deportation of her husband-to-be. Atta expressed amazement that the Italian government could even contemplate doing that to a foreign dignitary.

  Manifestly skeptical about Edgar, Viziano went further by counseling her to go to London and try to find out more about Chief White Elk.

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  Verification that Chief White Elk was an impostor and possessed no authority to represent American Indians reached the Italian government via the U.S. Embassy in Rome. On Friday, November 28, 1924—five days after the exposé in Gazzetta del Popolo—Edgar received another visit from the police. They informed him that he’d have to leave Italy once he was fit to travel.

  Erroneous newspaper reports of what was described as his arrest spread rapidly. Within a week, there were headlines about it in France, Belgium, Holland, and the United States. One of these declared WHITE ELK IS A CROOK. Another of them, suffused with condescending preconceptions about Native Americans, depicted him as “an Indian chief” who had gotten into the movies and “learned much of the white man’s ways,” notably the art of “fleecing wealthy women.”

  In the absence of press coverage of the loans Edgar had obtained from Milania, there was much speculation across Italy as to how he’d funded his tour of the country. Some said the Russian communist government—staunch ideological opponents of the Italian fascists—had underwritten it. Others said it had been financed by the Italian opposition. Either way, people agreed that the purpose of his tour had been to make Mussolini’s regime look ridiculous. Self-deprecating humor not being a characteristic of fascism, Edgar couldn’t count on getting any help from the PNF, formerly so assiduous in its courtship of him.

  The newspaper stories about his arrest, which fed widespread gossip, probably contributed to Atta’s sudden change of attitude toward him. She revealed her mounting anxiety in a letter she sent him from Fiumicello. “You have to try to come back here,” she wrote. “It’s the only place you can rest.” She explained that Georg was insistent upon the notion that the chief should stay at their villa until his debts had been cleared. “I have the highest regard for Indian honor, and all who have met you see in you an honorable person,” she added, her need to mention this hinting at her doubts as to just how honorable he really was. If “for whatever reason” he left the country without repaying what he owed her family, she reminded him, he’d bring shame upon his people. “My mother has done all she could for you. We are more or less ruined because of you.”

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  Heedless of Atta’s appeal to his honor and conscience, Edgar discharged himself from the hospital, went to the Swiss consulate in Turin, and applied for a two-month visa. It would allow him to enter Switzerland and resume his medical treatment at the hospital in Bellinzona, capital of the Swiss province of Ticino. Staffing the hospital were nuns from the same religious order as the sisters who had looked after him for the past couple of weeks. The Turin nuns, sensing further generous donations to their order, had arranged for their Swiss counterparts to accept him as a patient.

  Just in case Edgar had second thoughts about going to Switzerland, the Italian police escorted him
on the train ride there. Beyond the modern industrial city of Milan lay a route through a string of much smaller towns and cities, through countryside studded with villas and factories, through landscape dominated by mountains, one of them pierced by a tunnel, which took Edgar and his escort to the border with the Italian-speaking sector of Switzerland. They reached the bleakly inhospitable Swiss customs post on the afternoon of Saturday, December 13, 1924.

  Edgar had with him two battered trunks. The remainder of his possessions, comprising his chief’s outfit and a collection of black shirts that had presumably been given to him by his onetime fascist friends, would be mailed to Bellinzona.

  As the Swiss frontier guards checked his travel documents, he showed them some of the autographs and other souvenirs he’d accumulated. He also name-dropped the pope and other famous people. And he bragged about what a big spender he was. Though his expenditure these past seven months had been staggering, he may have been striving to impress the frontier guards by inflating the figure. He said he’d spent in excess of five million lire while he was in Italy—more than $247,000.

  Waved through the border, he continued his train journey, skirting Lake Lugano before crossing a narrow section of the lake via a half-mile causeway. More mountains, tunnels, and wooded ravines preceded his late-night arrival in the ancient, Italian-looking city of Bellinzona, which stretched across a valley that had once been dominated by three now partially ruined castles.

  Someone from the local hospital was waiting for him when he alighted at the train station. He presented a large gratuity to the porter who carried his luggage. Then he was chauffeured to the hospital, where he registered around midnight. He gave his name as His Excellency Prince White Elk, Tewanna Ray, and told the staff that he was a former physician.