King Con Page 32

  Edgar was placed in solitary confinement at the city’s prison. Deprived of an audience for his posturing, depression overwhelmed him. He also fell sick, the poor prison diet hastening his descent into emaciated frailty, yet he mustered the energy to find a new attorney to draft an appeal against his conviction. The attorney, Girolamo Bevinetto, was struck by Edgar’s “truly pitiful state” when the guards escorted him into the interview room for their first meeting. Edgar gave the impression that he’d been abandoned by everyone, so Bevinetto started bringing him food, sending him English and French magazines, and giving him money to buy cigarettes and milk. Other donations soon reached him from Ethel, as well as from the director of the prison, the U.S. consul, the local nunnery, and elsewhere. These consisted of money, along with shoes and warm clothing to fend off the encroaching winter.

  Bevinetto drew up an appeal citing nearly a dozen reasons why the verdict of Edgar’s trial should be overturned, or at the very least why the sentence should be reduced. Partnering the appeal was a rambling, floridly archaic statement by Edgar. In this, he pretended that his earlier accounts of his relationship with Milania and Atta were mere “Mother Goose stories.” Quoting a self-penned ode to chivalry, he claimed to have concocted these to spare the contessas’ embarrassment, because they’d hired him as a gigolo and an entertainer. He even had the gall to protest that they still owed him part of the prearranged fee. “Blame me for folly, but not for knavery,” his statement concluded.

  Hopeful of overturning the outcome of the trial, Bevinetto submitted the appeal in late December. Edgar then had a worrisome wait for his case to be heard. His life nonetheless improved over the ensuing month and a half. At last removed from solitary confinement, he reverted to playing the role of the gracious benefactor. When another prisoner asked him for a smoke, he took the last of his cigarettes out of his mouth, snapped it in two, and handed half to the man. Edgar also gave away his socks—“I gave them to a guy who needed them.” But altriusm wasn’t what motivated him. As he explained to Bevinetto, “Cotton socks are not suitable for those who are accustomed to silk ones.”

  Textiles were soon to become more than just a badge of status for Edgar, who was put to work in the prison’s knitwear shop, where he rapidly learned how to hand-stitch embroidery and operate a weaving machine. His minuscule income from that work averaged less than a lire a day.

  He wasn’t short of cash, though, due to a generous monetary gift from one of his female fans, which must have contributed to his cheerful disposition the next time Bevinetto visited him. The gift came from an aristocratic Belgian writer, who believed in Edgar’s self-proclaimed cause as an Indian rights campaigner. Half the money was credited to him at the prison commissary and the other half went toward the cost of having a daily lunch brought in from a local restaurant. His Belgian benefactress also offered him a job as her chauffeur, secretary, or bodyguard when he was released from jail. But he declined her offer because he wasn’t, as he informed her, certain what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

  The court of appeal’s examination of his case would go a long way toward clarifying his immediate future. All over Europe there was press coverage of what one leading Italian newspaper billed as this “latest episode in the now-famous courtroom comic drama.” With lip-smacking relish, the front page of Paris-soir led with THE RISE AND FALL OF WHITE ELK. And another French newspaper ran a story claiming that Edgar was a Frenchman from the working-class Parisian suburb of Belleville.

  Both the court’s original verdict and the sentence ended up being upheld by the presiding judges. On the assumption that “no one in this world is completely normal,” their ruling spurned the notion that Edgar’s abnormal psychology was a mitigating factor in his crimes.

  His personality had, however, come to fascinate the attorney who represented him during the appeal process. Bevinetto afterward dashed off a short and sympathetic book about Edgar’s dealings with the Khevenhüller-Metsch family. Entitled Le Avventure di Edgardo Laplante (The Adventures of Edgar Laplante), it was released in a small edition by an obscure Italian imprint. Bevinetto’s book hailed him the “con man supreme.”

  * * *

  —

  Across the Atlantic, where references to Edgar had long since evaporated from the newspapers, a fellow con man and pale-skinned publicity hound by the name of Charles Smith obtained inspiration from his shenanigans. Smith posed first as the son of Chief White Elk and then as the chief himself. Over a five-month period, this counterfeit of a counterfeit fronted promotional events at Californian car dealerships, addressed schoolchildren about Indian tradition, and crowed to the press about his power to influence sports contests by performing ritual dances. He also grabbed his own sliver of notoriety by getting himself picked up as a suspect in the murder of a twenty-year-old woman, later identified as a typhoid victim.

  Edgar was meanwhile transferred to Civitavecchia prison, only a short distance from Rome. Broke once again, he was reduced to paying for cigarettes by selling the gold crowns on several of his teeth.

  Good behavior earned him parole just two and a half years into his sentence. But the Italian fascist regime, which had lately completed its evolution into a dictatorship, branded him “a dangerous character” and refused to release him until he could be repatriated at his own expense. Edgar was probably behind the failed bid to persuade his father—whom he hadn’t seen for fifteen years—to put up the $118 fare home.

  He had to endure another two months at Civitavecchia until the local U.S. consul secured employment for him as a mess steward on the SS Executive, an American cargo vessel, scheduled to steam from Genoa to New York City in mid-August 1929. Before that, Edgar was moved to Le Nuove prison in Turin, where he shared a cell with the nineteen-year-old anti-fascist Massimo Mila, who would go on to become an eminent music critic.

  In readiness for the SS Executive’s departure, the Italian authorities then moved Edgar to Genoa, a city he’d last visited during his triumphal tour of the country. He was turned loose from prison only just prior to embarkation, at which point he exchanged his jail uniform for the uniform of a mess steward. Dapper though he looked in his latest costume, made up of a white mess jacket, matching shirt, dark trousers, and wavily striped necktie, his once-photogenic features bore the heavy boot print of life in jail. His skin had grown coarse, his mouth was bracketed by deep grooves, and his teeth were badly discolored and punctuated by gaps. Only his hair, which he wore in a fashionable greased-back style, remained unaltered, still dark and dense.

  American and Italian journalists seized the opportunity to quiz him before he departed. He told the Italians that prison had transformed his personality, revived his love of hard work, and cured him of what he called his two vices—alcohol and morphine. Any mention of his parallel cocaine addiction was omitted.

  When Edgar spoke with a representative from the Associated Press, he announced that he bore no ill feeling toward the country where he had been imprisoned for so long. His comments, together with reports of his imminent homeward voyage, were carried by numerous American newspapers. At least Edgar had the consolation of knowing he hadn’t been forgotten.

  27

  Save for a dog-eared copy of the transcript of his Italian trial, fifteen dollar bills, and a wooden spoon, used for the duration of his imprisonment, Edgar had no luggage when his ship docked in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, on Friday, September 20, 1929. He wore the rest of his possessions: a neat gray suit, a matching necktie, a white shirt, and a pair of tan oxfords. The one thing distinguishing him was the unconventional absence of a hat.

  He’d been at sea for the better part of a month, during which he had impressed his commanding officer with his efficiency as a mess steward. Mundane though his duties had been, Edgar had transformed them into a theatrical performance, balancing a circular tray on the tips of his fingers with the aplomb of a waiter at some elegant Manhattan restaurant.

&
nbsp; From the deck of the SS Executive, he had a view across the East River toward the city, where pale wisps of smoke typically meandered across the bar chart of its skyline, which had sprouted many more skyscrapers since he last saw it. As the river’s choppy waters slapped against the rotting wooden pier that constituted the Greenpoint Terminal, Edgar strode down the gangplank. Below him, a rat swam frantically along the narrow channel between the ship and the wharf.

  Edgar’s noonday arrival, which overlapped with a shrill blast from a factory whistle, could scarcely have been more different from his arrival in so many Italian ports only five summers back. There was no cheering crowd, no brass band, no government welcoming party, no ripple of fascist salutes. There were no picturesque buildings, either. Just a strip of grimy waterfront, lined with enormous factories, one of which had ROPE & TWINE written across the front in huge letters. But for a mangy dog, two blue-coated dockworkers, and two reporters and their attendant press photographers, waiting in the fall sunshine, the waterfront was deserted.

  His swagger unimpaired by his European ordeal, Edgar posed for the photographers, a pair of dark glasses accentuating his casual panache. He also sold the New York Times some hokum about how he’d be “quite content” to settle down in Rhode Island and become “a plain factory worker.” Perched on an upturned oil drum, he then spoke to a female feature writer from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, who was interested in his recent past. “And to think that it was all because of a woman.” he mused. “Originally I came from Pawtucket, Rhode Island. I am partly Indian. My mother was a member of the Tuscarora tribe. While I was out in California, the Paramount Film Company hired me to go to London with the production The Covered Wagon, as an interpreter to the Indians who were acting in it. While we were over there, the publicity man had the bright idea of billing me as ‘Chief White Elk,’ a delegate to the League of Nations, representing the American Indian. As luck would have it, at the same time there was an Indian chief who had come over to plead with the king on behalf of his people. One day a man from Paramount asked me to make a speech and the crowd sort of…got me confused with the visiting chief and that’s how it all started.”

  Edgar proceeded to unfurl a distorted account of being sent to the continent and meeting the younger of the Contessas Khevenhüller-Metsch in Nice. He said she’d insisted on going for a coffee with him, and the two of them had afterward shared a cab home. “Well, the next thing I knew, the contessa had burst into tears and was telling me how much I looked like the fiancé that her family had not allowed her to marry. The only way I could make her stop was to accept the pearl ring that she took off her finger and thrust into my hand—and the diamond bracelet, too.”

  He talked about how she’d obtained his address from the management of the movie theater where he worked. “Before I could say a word, she took out a blue silk bag and tossed it into my lap. In it was $10,000! When I refused to accept it, she insisted that it was my half of the winnings at Monte Carlo, as she had worn the lucky feather that I had given her out of my headdress the night before.

  “Things began to get so deep that I thought I had better pay a visit to my wife, an English girl whom I married four months before I signed up with the Paramount Company. I told the contessa and her mother goodbye and went home to her in England. Everything went along fine for a couple of days, but pretty soon cables began to arrive and one day along came a cable from the Bank of Manchester with a draft for £1,500 from the contessa. There was nothing to do but to go back and try to straighten things out with her. I joined her in Trieste, at the Savoia Hotel, where I was given the Royal Suite No. 14. Picking up the pen, I wrote on the register ‘Chief White Elk’ but was told to change it to ‘pasha,’ as ‘chief’ was very confusing because of its use among the military attachés in Italy. So I wrote ‘pasha’ and went on up to bed.

  “The next morning—bright and early—somebody knocked. When I yelled ‘Come in!’ in walked a bellboy so full of gold braid that he was all bent over. ‘What does your Highness require this morning?’

  “I answered, ‘Sleep!’ so he went out and closed the door.

  “In a few moments in rushed the contessa all excited and said, ‘Come, put on your pants—the ones with the beads on and your hat with the feathers. They will soon be here!’

  “Soon, in they came. Dozens of them. All in gold-braided uniforms like a musical comedy. Generals and the mayor and everybody. They led me onto the balcony where they presented me with a silver key to the city, and down in the courtyard the band played the National Anthem, and everybody was shouting.

  “When they had gone, the contessa sprung the real surprise. She had chartered the top deck of a steamer and we were to leave in the morning for a trip.”

  He added that there was no way he could get out of the arrangement. “Every port that we pulled into gave us the royal salute. Life was a dream.” Back in Trieste, he explained, four cars and a seaplane were placed at his disposal. “In a way, this bearing of gifts isn’t new to me. You see, it is an old Indian custom with my people, so why shouldn’t I accept them? How did I know that brother Georg was out to get my scalp? It seems that he didn’t like to see me getting all that money and those gifts, so he did some enquiring here and there. When we got back from the cruise, I was all slated for another little trip—this time to Civitavecchia prison, just outside Rome.”

  The reporter asked about the younger contessa’s reaction to him landing in jail.

  “Oh, she went insane the day that I was convicted,” he replied. “Night after night I used to try to go to sleep thinking of the United States and what a fool I was to ever leave. All I ever had to eat was thin soup and half-steamed spaghetti. I used to starve myself so that the doctor would order milk and eggs, just to get off that diet for a few days.”

  Well-stocked now with material for her story, the reporter and her photographer offered Edgar a ride to a nearby subway station. Their car drove through bustling though not especially prosperous Greenpoint and into the Navy Yard District, tenements abutting cobblestoned streets not dissimilar to where Edgar was raised. What must have been alien to him, though, were the new clothes and hairstyles that had appeared since he left the United States almost seven years earlier.

  Through the windshield, Edgar would have seen the swelling silhouette of the Brooklyn Bridge. “Say, this is Sands Street, isn’t it?” he said as the car reached a narrow, dingy thoroughfare, where trolley buses skirted coffee shops and stores selling naval uniforms. The car pulled up just across from a drugstore near the bridge. Almost blocking the sidewalk outside was a covered stairway up to the huge, elevated train station above.

  “D’you know, I am just like a kid about being back in the States again?” Edgar remarked. “I stayed up all night to see the Statue of Liberty.” His attention was suddenly hijacked by a passing young woman. “Look at that girl’s skirt,” he added. “Why, when I left in 1923, girls would have been ashamed to show their knees like that.” Thoughts of women coaxed his mind in another direction. “As soon as I can get enough money together, I am going to send for my wife who is still in England. She’s my second wife—my first wife was an Indian from the Klamath tribe in California. She died during the flu epidemic. I can’t do enough for the girl I have now. She has been true blue all the way through. What worries me is just what I’ll do with my future, as $15 isn’t so much.”

  “Well, maybe the contessa will…?” the reporter ventured.

  But Edgar cut in. “The contessa!” he exclaimed with dismissive vehemence. “She’s a regular Indian giver. Now she claims that I stole the jewels and the money. Well, maybe my lawyer will be able to…” He let the sentence fizzle out, then shook hands with the reporter before they parted. Anyone who glimpsed Edgar walking along Sands Street would have pegged him as an average commuter, maybe a shift worker on his way into Manhattan. Had they struck up a conversation with him in a subway car or at a lunch counter,
they would have taken him for a madman if he’d dropped so much as a cursory reference to the swank hotels he’d stayed in, the Italians who had addressed him as “Your Highness,” the vast sums of money he’d squandered, the aristocrats who had once fawned over him, the huge crowds that had greeted him, the banquets staged in his honor, the women who had loved him.

  EPILOGUE

  Edgar’s once impeccable sense of timing had deserted him. A shade over four weeks after he said goodbye to the woman from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 occasioned a protracted and savage economic depression. Even without that, circumstances were against him.

  Over the preceding few years, his homeland had been subject to changes that were certain to make life difficult for him no matter whether he stayed on the right side of the law or resumed his former life. If he chose the latter, he’d have to contend with the still understaffed yet increasingly effective Bureau of Investigation, forerunner of the FBI. Most threatening from Edgar’s point of view was the creation of an Identification Division, entrusted with collecting fingerprints from police forces across the nation and searching that collection upon request. The nationwide distribution of wanted posters, featuring details of criminal suspects on the run, posed another impediment to Edgar’s old habit of moving to a fresh city whenever doubts about his identity surfaced. Recent improvements in communications between cities didn’t help with that, either, those advances being in telephone technology, the birth of national radio networks, and the highways starting to branch across the country.