King Con Page 31
If Edgar thought the situation couldn’t get any worse, then he was in for a nasty surprise. At the insistence of her stepson, Milania had been persuaded to press charges against him. Edgar was also the subject of a complaint to the Neuchâtel police by the owner of the Grand Hôtel du Lac. The police responded by wiring their counterparts in Ticino, the region within which Bellinzona was located. From Ticino, they received word that the “prince” had already been the subject of unfavorable reports about his “questionable morals.”
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Later that day, Edgar knocked on the door of the hospital run by the Catholic Brothers of Providence, though he and providence were no longer on speaking terms. He was not only seeking sanctuary but also probably hoping the doctors would take pity on him and give him a series of cocaine and morphine injections. Without those, he’d continue to suffer the menu of withdrawal symptoms from which he was being treated to a five-course banquet. Stomach cramps, fatigue, sweating, nausea, anxiety, vomiting, and nightmares were just a few of its constituent delicacies.
Once he’d been admitted to the hospital, he somehow got his hands on enough cognac to offer him a route to either alcoholic oblivion or suicide. While he was holed up that evening, the Ticino police issued a warrant against him on fraud charges. Their equivalents in Neuchâtel promptly launched a search for him.
Accompanied by the commissioners of both police departments, the search party found him at the hospital shortly after midnight on Wednesday, January 14, 1925. He looked very surprised when he saw them, yet his expression of astonishment faded quickly. He must have known he’d finally landed in a jam from which no amount of talking could extricate him.
“The comedy’s over,” he said as the police arrested him. They led him out of the hospital and into the midwinter darkness. Except for his feathered headdress, a droopy memento of happier times, he had nothing with him, not even a few coins left over from the huge sums of money that had slithered through his fingers like one of the imaginary trout in his imaginary kingdom.
Portrait of Edgar Laplante and his wife Burtha Thompson, taken by Emma B. Freeman in Washington State, 1918.
The Newberry Library
Poster for the big-budget 1923 epic whose European release Edgar Laplante helped to promote.
Poster for the 1920 silent movie in which Edgar Laplante, aka Chief White Elk, claimed to have acted.
The front cover of a December 1923 monthly guide to Parisian nightlife. The Dolly Sisters, among the Jazz Age’s biggest stars, were performing at the same venue as Chief White Elk.
Bibliothèque nationale de France
The Café du Dôme, the famous Left Bank bohemian haunt where Edgar Laplante became a regular.
The Estate of André Kertész, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Chief White Elk sold signed souvenir postcards like this one when he was living in Paris.
Aloha Wanderwell, ca. 1924.
National Automotive History Collection, Detroit Public Library
The troupe of Arapaho who helped to promote The Covered Wagon posing before a screening of the movie in 1924. Ed Farlow, who supervised their tour, is pictured center stage.
Fremont County Pioneer Museum
Advertisement for the Parisian cabaret in which “the famous Chief White Elk” appeared, October 1923.
Travel poster promoting Venice, 1920.
Library of Congress
“The Beautiful Zoulaïka,” the scandalous belly dancer who was part of the same Parisian cabaret as Chief White Elk, 1923.
Bibliothèque nationale de France
Roseray and Capella, the gymnastic duo who appeared in the same Parisian cabaret as Chief White Elk, 1923.
Bibliothèque nationale de France
Mug shots of Edgar Laplante, taken by the Swiss police, January 1925.
National Archives, UK
View of the Grand Canal, Venice, September 1920.
Library of Congress
Cover of the magazine section of the August 23, 1925, issue of New Orleans States.
Library of Congress
The fifty-four-year-old Edgar Laplante in a 1942 press photo.
Library of Congress
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At the police headquarters in Bellinzona, he was fingerprinted, weighed, and measured. His dejection temporarily alleviated by the prospect of stepping in front of a camera, he was also photographed for a sequence of mug shots. And he was given a physical examination, which revealed two scars on his chest. He said that one of them had been caused by shrapnel during an explosion on the ship he’d served aboard. The other had, he explained, come from “a rather barbaric Indian rite.” Fourteen-year-olds from his tribe were obliged to prove themselves, he claimed, by undergoing ritual wounding with a flaming spear.
When the time came for him to be questioned, the local police chief broke the ice by handing him a cigarette and saying he wasn’t sure how to address him.
Edgar must’ve felt cornered, drug and alcohol withdrawal leaving him desperate enough to try to appease the police chief by answering at least one question truthfully. So he told the man to make inquiries in Rhode Island. “Look for an Edgar Laplante and you will find the precise facts about me,” he said. But he proceeded to tell a string of such improbable stories that his real name was assumed to be an alias.
Asked whether he had a criminal record, he replied, “When I was a boy I used to steal cherries and potatoes. I never stole anything else.”
His response was contradicted by the speed with which he adjusted to his routine behind bars, speed indicative of prior acquaintance with the inside of a jail cell. Sharing his new home was a man arraigned on petty theft charges and placed there as a stool pigeon. Too melancholy for conversation, though, Edgar spent much of the time slumped in the corner. Only the prospect of someday writing his autobiography perked him up. He even used this to buttress his sense of his own importance by chattering about it to a visiting journalist. In an article for Corriere della Sera, the journalist salivated over the thought of Edgar telling “the story of his great life.”
The Swiss police meanwhile retrieved Edgar’s possessions from the Lugano hotelier who had impounded them. Included in his luggage was the Document of Identity he’d obtained in London, establishing him as Tewanna Ray, Chief White Elk. To ascertain whether this really was his name, the police contacted the American and British authorities.
His true identity took several weeks to confirm. In that time, his case generated widespread European press coverage, much of it veined with amused incredulity. “How and where was he born?” asked Corriere della Sera. “Nothing is certain, not even his age….He has said he is forty, fifty, and sixty-two on various occasions. From his travel papers, he should be only thirty-seven. From his face, experts say they can only tell he has led a full life.”
Even the showbiz trade paper Variety ran a piece on him. It quoted a conversation with his father, who was scraping out a living in a basement carpentry shop. Quizzed about the oil wells that Edgar had said he owned, his father wisecracked, “Banana oil.”
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Dozens of letters from female admirers started arriving at Bellinzona police headquarters. Edgar never got to read these, because the police withheld them. Otherwise he was well treated, something Atta did her best to ensure. In the misguided belief that he still had the money he’d stolen from her family, she figured such good treatment would make him more inclined to divulge the whereabouts of their cash. Playing to his better nature, she and Milania paid off the Swiss debts he’d run up, and Georg helped to fund his defense by presenting him with a large sum of money and a diamond ring.
Atta, Milania, and Georg even visited him in jail. Mila
nia remained so susceptible to his charm that she invited him to join her in San Marino once he was freed from prison. Every time she and her stepdaughter saw him, Edgar put on a show of mournful penitence, which vanished the moment they left the room. Bumming cigarettes off the guards then became his priority. “You’ll laugh when you hear about my adventures in Brussels,” he said to them.
His self-congratulatory delight hidden behind a necessary mask of contrition, he wrote to Atta: “I am very sorry that everything has taken a bad turn.” On this note of inadvertently comic understatement, he assured her that he’d borrowed the money from her mother only because it gave him “an opportunity to do good.” Angling for her family’s assistance in returning to the United States, he promised to find employment and repay them at the rate of one hundred dollars a month. “Please ask your mother to forgive me,” his letter concluded. He must have been hoping that his plea for forgiveness would distract Atta and her mother from scrutinizing the practicalities of his mooted repayment schedule. Clearing his entire debt to them would take a mere 465 years.
But forgiveness was not uppermost in the minds of Atta and family, their posture toward Edgar probably altered by some recent information from Ethel. She revealed that the Canadian authorities had notified her that Edgar was “not an Indian,” and that there was no record of anyone named Chief White Elk. So Atta, Georg, and their stepmother filed charges against Edgar in Italy. As an excuse for their own gullibility, they accused him of defrauding them by using his powers as “a hypnotist” and “master of magic.”
Their case against him was vastly more serious than its Swiss counterpart, because the Swiss could prosecute him only for crimes committed in that country. Proceedings were initiated to extradite Edgar to Italy, but the Swiss rebuffed these and slated him to stand trial in Lugano that June. He faced five counts of fraud against the Khevenhüller-Metsch family and others.
Uninhibited by feelings of shame, Edgar sought help from Ethel of all people. “I know I have done wrong,” he admitted before floating the idea of them getting back together after he’d shaken off his current problems. She and Leslie should, he proposed, go back with him to America, where the three of them could “start life anew.” The potent lure of a fresh start blinding Ethel to all the suffering he’d inflicted upon her, she was soon penning letters of support for him and soliciting the assistance of the U.S. consular service.
His chosen defense against the fraud charges was “partial insanity.” Arrangements were made by his attorney for him to be examined by Dr. Bruno Manzoni, director of a psychiatric hospital not far from Lugano. Dr. Manzoni’s ensuing, remarkably insightful report diagnosed Edgar as “a psychopath,” who could “only tell the truth by mistake.” It was a diagnosis that had nothing to do with the latter-day meaning of that word. For the psychiatrists of that era, psychopaths were people prone to a range of compulsive behavior—from alcoholism and prodigality to lying and swindling. Within those parameters, Edgar was a textbook psychopath, so Dr. Manzoni argued that the charges against him should be dropped on grounds of diminished responsibility.
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Neither Atta nor Milania were in the courtroom when the trial opened. Georg was there, however. Populating the gallery were journalists from across Europe, not to mention some of Edgar’s voguishly attired female fans. His enduring popularity with women delighted him.
Dressed in ordinary clothes instead of his Cherokee costume, now draped across the evidence table in front of him, Edgar cut a diminished figure. For the journalists, whose retrospective wisdom alerted them to the shoddiness of that costume, the sight of his current incarnation was hard to reconcile with the prosecutor’s portrait of him as “the biggest swindler of all-time.”
Under cross-examination in French, he endured a succession of uncomfortable moments, none more so than when the prosecutor said, “Do you remember that you told the authorities that you had a medical diploma from Carlisle?”
“I don’t remember,” he answered.
“Do you not often claim to have attended Carlisle?”
“I just went there to play football.”
“A letter from that college has just been received by the authorities. It states that they don’t know you—even as a football player.”
Waves of laughter from the gallery greeted his evasive and often patently ridiculous responses to other questions. “Did you say that you owned a lot of land in Canada?” the prosecutor asked him.
“Well, I certainly hope to own a lot of land.”
Challenged about his reference to being sixty years of age, he fobbed off the prosecutor with an ingenious reply: “According to the Italian calendar, I am thirty, but according to the Arabic calendar, where a year equals six months, I am sixty.”
He plumbed similar depths of absurdity when asked about his bigamous marriage to Ethel. “In the States,” he explained, “you can marry twice—once under your baptismal name and once with another name.”
But all this was subsidiary to the most important question. How did he come to obtain so much of the contessas’ money?
“They just forced it on me,” he said.
Gleeful coverage across America as well as Europe commented on each day of his trial. THE INCREDIBLE REAL-LIFE MOVIE one of the Italian headlines blared.
During the trial’s summing-up phase, the defense attorney argued that Edgar shouldn’t be convicted of fraud, because he’d given away the money. The attorney also highlighted Edgar’s psychological abnormality and emphasized that he wasn’t responsible for his actions. If anyone was to blame for what happened, Edgar’s attorney stated, it was the public, who treated him as a genuine prince. Loud applause emanated from the gallery when the attorney’s closing remarks culminated in an appeal for clemency.
On its fifth day, the trial concluded with the judge ruling that Edgar couldn’t be absolved from “the hideousness of his misdeeds” because he possessed “a lively intelligence and a deep intuition.” He was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment—minus time served—and ordered to pay a heavy fine, though his penniless state rendered that purely theoretical. As he was led down the courthouse steps, two glamorous young women stepped out of the crowd and handed him packs of cigarettes. An Italian reporter, who witnessed his blank-faced acceptance of these, later quipped, “It’s all smoke.”
Edgar was transported from the courthouse to the psychiatric hospital in Bellinzona and placed under observation, because there must have been a suspicion that he’d try to commit suicide. Chances were, he had no idea that his case had meanwhile become the subject of another flurry of newspaper articles in cities from Vienna to New Orleans. His case also spawned an American movie that borrowed from his life as freely as he had once borrowed from the contessas. Released by Universal Studios as The Open Trail, it told of a white man who believed himself to be a Native American named White Elk.
After two months, Edgar was transferred from the psychiatric hospital to Lugano’s prison, where he’d been held in the run-up to his trial, conditions prompting him to complain, “It’s worse than Siberia.” He remained there until the fall, by which time the Swiss authorities had announced that they’d soon be freeing him. In preparation for his anticipated return to America, the steadfast Ethel and her now eleven-year-old son appear to have moved from England to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where they could set up home with Edgar. The prospect of them becoming a family again came a lot closer to fruition when he walked out of jail shortly before 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday, October 20, 1925.
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The order had already been issued. From the prison, he was taken to Switzerland’s southeast frontier and handed over to the Italian authorities. They conveyed him to the jail in Trieste, ready to stand trial on the charges that Milania and family had filed.
For just short of a year, Edgar—who bore his captivity with stoicism, enlivened by sparks of skittish h
umor—was held in Trieste and then Turin while he awaited his next court appearance. At a preliminary hearing, the prosecutor asked, “Have you ever spoken to the contessa about owning fabulous wealth in Canada and having large sums of money deposited in English banks?”
“I cannot answer ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ ” Edgar said, “because when I was with the contessa I was often drunk on the whiskey she made me drink.”
Near the end of the summer of 1926, Edgar received a letter from England, written by the devoted Ethel, who informed him: “We are looking forward every day to your release from prison.” She went on to write:
I enclose two small photographs, one of Leslie and one of me, taken in Blackpool. I wrote to the American consul, asking him to let me have a full account of the case. You must not be sorry if Leslie does not write to you, because he is not even at home for two minutes and spends all his time on his bicycle. But, dear, he always asks about you.
I close here, dear, because there is no other news to give you. All the people in my family say hullo.
With the greatest love and kisses from me and Leslie.
Yours forever,
Ethel
Yet her long-awaited reunion with Edgar could not occur until he’d stood trial in Turin during the fall. His latest spell in the dock generated still more international newspaper coverage and courthouse hilarity. Unlike the previous trial, though, Atta, Georg, and their quivery-voiced stepmother gave evidence against Edgar, who, as one reporter observed, wore a low-key outfit that included “large glasses made of tortoise shell—fake, of course.” The testimony of the Khevenhüller-Metsch family helped to ensure another guilty verdict. It led to a jail sentence of seven years, five months, and fifteen days. With that came a 9,000-lire fine and an order to repay 1,018,657 lire to Milania, though there was scant possibility of Milania ever recouping this substantial amount of money.