Parker French - A Man of Confidence

The world is full of people of genius.  Many of these people go on to do great things.  Parker used his genius to spend his life scamming people.

Parker was born in Kentucky in the early 1820's and soon became an orphan for reasons that are not important to this story.  Raised by a kindly local judge, Parker received the best education possible until he got bored, ran away, and joined the British Navy.  Several years later he returned, his pockets stuffed with cash, and thanked the judge for his past kindness by marrying the man's daughter.  Everything started to go to shit from there.  Parker's first scam was to collect money to build a ship to take people to the Californian gold mines.  The fact that Parker lived in St. Louis, which is decidedly not near the ocean, should have been a tip off that things weren't on the up and up, but people were more trusting back then.  When the scam was found out, Parker skedaddled to New York City and, just to show that he had a sense of humor about the whole thing, granted himself the title of Captain.

In New York City, Parker started signing up people again for an expedition to California, promising to get them there within sixty days.  Numerous people, greedy for gold, paid to join up and Parker used their money to live an exorbitant lifestyle.  After several months of delays Parker got his shit together enough to get the expedition out of New York, sailing to Texas, which as some of you have probably noticed, is not California.  Never a man to back down from a challenge, Parker told the expedition that it would be quicker to head overland across the arid Southwest.  To accomplish this feat, he purchased some old circus wagons and several tons of food using fraudulent letters of credit from some of the biggest shipping firms in New York.  However, all good things come to an end.  Parker’s creditors caught up to his decidedly colorful wagon train by the time he reached El Paso.  Not ready to face the music, Parker fled with a couple of cohorts into Mexico, abandoning the expedition members to find their own damn way home.  A small group of these cheated potential gold miners, pissed off for some reason, tried to hunt Parker down, but he and his thugs ambushed them.  During the resulting gunfight Parker was shot in the arm, leading to it getting amputated.  

Parker stayed in Mexico for a time, running several cons and robbing ranchers at gunpoint.  Finally tiring of his shit, Mexico locked him in jail, but released him eighteen months later when he promised to get the hell out of the country.  Parker made his way north to California where he set himself up as a newspaper man, a job which made him popular enough that he managed to get himself elected to the state legislature.  To celebrate, he punched a former governor in the face and got shot in the leg.  Finding politics rather boring, Parker abandoned his post in 1855 to join William Walker’s invasion of Nicaragua, granting himself the title of Colonel because why hell not.  When the invasion succeeded, Walker declared Parker the new government’s ambassador to the United States.  The U.S. government, less than impressed with the whole thing, refused to meet with Parker, so he instead held lavish parties and went on a speaking tour to raise funds and recruit more soldiers.  However, as always, most of the cash he raised ended up in his own pocket.  Parker then tried to return to Nicaragua, but by then Walker was rather tired of his shit and wouldn’t let him stay.     

Things began to unravel after that.  Over the next fifteen years Parker and his wife crisscrossed the country, running various scams to arrive.  These scams included a land scheme in Minnesota, a fake newspaper in San Francisco, an imaginary opium shipment in New Orleans, something involving ginseng, and the selling of non-existent ships to the U.S. Navy in Boston.  During the Civil War he was imprisoned for a time on the suspicion he might be a Confederate spy, but even that turned out to be only part of some elaborate scam.  After getting set free, he did a few more scams just to keep a roof over his head and then disappeared from history.  His last known whereabouts was living in a gutter in Washington D.C., slowly killing himself with cocktails of whiskey and chloroform. 

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parker_H._French.jpg   

Edwin Forrest - Actors Have Always Been Crazy

In the mid-nineteenth century Eddie was the most famous Shakespearean actor in all of the United States, but he wanted more; he wanted to be the most famous in the world.

Young Eddie, the son of a banker, was no different than most 14 year olds at the time, in that he had no idea what the hell he wanted to do.  Jumping from apprenticeship to apprenticeship, nothing seemed like a good fit.  Eddie was discovered the same way most actors today are, at a drug party.  Eddie, high out of his gourd on nitrous oxide, the drug of choice for the affluent back then, launched into a soliloquy that so impressed some local thespians that they asked if he had ever acted before.  When he told them that as a child he had played a girl in a melodrama, they gave him an audition on the spot.  Eddie started his career acting in theaters across the southern and western U.S., the equivalent of doing commercials and B-movies today.  During this time, he gained fame for his blackface caricature, which was said to be so good that it fooled African Americans, though to be fair, this was a time when slavery was still legal, so it wasn't like they could just tell him to fuck off.  Eddie's big break came at age 23 when he started playing Shakespeare parts in New York City and Philadelphia, gaining widespread fame and accolades.

Having achieved fame in America, Eddie traveled to London where he garnered further acclaim.  It was here that Eddie met William Macready, the most famous Shakespearean actor in all of England.  The two got along well as friendly rivals.  Eddie soon after returned to America so pleased with his trip that he married an English woman.  Nine years later, now a man of 39, Eddie returned to England.  Things did not go well a second time.  The theatergoers in London did not like his take on Macbeth and hissed at him.  Eddie took offense and, for god only knows what reason, blamed the hissing on the jealous machinations of Willy.  Seeking revenge, Eddie traveled to Edinburgh, where Willy was playing Hamlet, rented a private box, and hissed at him.  This act insulted the Englishman’s fragile pride, leading him to call Eddie, "without taste", which is an old timey way of saying he was a piece of shit.  Eddie was forced to return to the U.S. as a reviled man.

The next four years were rough on Eddie.  Pretty sick of England, he soon after separated from his wife due to becoming suspicious that she might be cheating on him, a thought that probably entered his head because he was cheating on her.  Even worse, his rival Willy came to America to tour and prove once and for all who was the better actor.  Incensed, Eddie stalked Willy across the country, appearing in the same plays just days after Willy left.  Over time their rivalry began to represent the class warfare of the day, with Eddie representing the working class stiffs and Willy representing the gentile aristocracy, because nothing sounds more aristocratic than a fancy accent.  The rich guffawed and dropped their monocles in shock at Eddie’s antics.  The poor threw half a dead sheep onto the stage at Willy’s feet.  Things finally came to a head when both men played Macbeth in New York City at two theaters very close to each other.  Eddie’s fans, being the classiest, threw eggs and garbage at Willy on opening night and hissed and booed so loudly that no one was able to hear the play.  Three nights later Willy again took the stage.  This time Eddie’s fans started a riot and tried to burn down the theater.  While Willy escaped in disguise, the city called out the state militia which started randomly shooting people, killing 30and injuring 210.  This in turn led to a second riot the next day.    

Disgusted at it all, Willy returned to England and soon after happily retired.  Eddie became involved in an overly dramatic and heavily reported upon divorce.  Highlights included Eddie beating his wife’s alleged lover with a whip and his wife claiming that what Eddie thought was cheating as actually being just amateur phrenology.  The whole experience left Eddie decidedly sour.  However, he stayed in the theater for years afterward, continuing to have success until he developed severe gout at age 59, causing him to suffer from an unsteady gait and lose the use of one of his hands.  His career went downhill from there, after which he spent most of his time in his castle like mansion on the Hudson River, leading several philanthropic efforts and thinking up ways to avoid paying alimony owed to his ex-wife.  He died of a stroke at the age of 66, which probably had nothing to do with him being a little high strung.   

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edwin_Forrest_as_Damon.jpg   

Hetty Green - The Witch of Wall Street

Ebenezer Scrooge was real, just not with the genitals you expected.  Hetty Green was the richest woman alive in the late nineteenth century, worth over $4 billion in today's money (it will all be in today's money).  Hetty made her money through shrewd conservative investing, staying calm when others panicked, and being cheap as hell.

Hetty was born into a wealthy whaling family to a workaholic father and a sickly mother.  She spent most of her childhood at her father's side, learning the ins and outs of business.  The woman could barely write a legible sentence, but by age 6 she was reading stock quotes every evening.  Hetty's father tried to marry her off when she came of age, giving her a new wardrobe worth thousands of dollars.  Hetty sold the clothes and invested in the stock market.  Her father died shortly after the end of the Civil War, leaving her a sizable fortune of $77 million.  Hetty celebrated by marrying Edward Green, a man of enough means that he'd keep his hands off her money.  She then celebrated her nuptials by forging her recently deceased Aunt Sylvia's will in an attempt to score another $30 million that had been willed to charity.   This did not work out well and Hetty was forced to flee to London to escape forgery charges.

In London, Hetty gave birth to two children, Ned and Sylvia (because if you’re going to try to defraud your dead aunt you might as well name your kid after them), and started making money hand over fist by buying paper U.S. dollars that were issued during the Civil War.  Once the statute of limitations was up, Hetty and Edward moved their family back to New York, where Hetty started investing in railroads, speculating on the stock market, and buying up mortgages.  As her fortune grew, she also started lending money to bankers and brokerage houses.  Everything she touched turned to gold.  However, when it came to light that Edward had been using some of her money, Hetty took the children and left.  It was at this point that things began to go off the rails.

Not seeing much reason to be a spendthrift, Hetty moved her family into a tiny apartment with no heat or hot water (partly to try to hide from the taxman).  When her children complained of the cold, she stuffed their clothes with old newspapers.  When Ned hurt his leg, Hetty tried to take him to the local free clinic, but was forced to flee when she was recognized as one of the richest women in the country.  Refusing to pay for a doctor she instead let Ned's leg get infected to the point where it had to be amputated, which she forced her estranged husband to pay for.  As Hetty got older she became even more miserly.  At the same time that Hetty was making several multi-million dollar loans to New York City and some of the largest banks in the country to help keep them solvent, she was wearing the same black dress that she had worn every day for years on end.  It’s probably also worth mentioning that she commanded her laundress to only wash the dirty parts of the dress in order to save on soap.

Hetty's frugality became the stuff of legends.  For twenty years she suffered from a painful hernia, which she held in by jamming a small stick in her underwear.  When it became too much a problem she went to a doctor who promptly told her he could fix it for $3,500.  In response, Hetty calmly put the stick back in her underwear and left.  Hetty worked each day in a cold dark office, subsisting off dry oatmeal she heated on another office's radiator.  Though she kept half a billion in cash on hand at all times she lived off of $200 a week.  Once she lost a 2 cent stamp in her carriage and spent the entire night looking for it.  The only thing she spent money on was her beloved dog Curtis, whose name she put on her front door to confuse the taxman.  Paranoid of kidnappers, she slept with a revolver tied to her wrist with a string.  After Hetty died her vast fortune went to Ned and Sylvia.  Sylvia built herself a mansion and mostly kept to herself.  Ned gave himself the nickname Colonel, married a hooker named Mabel, and threw lavish and extravagant parties.  When Ned died his share went to his sister.  When Sylvia died she gave a final fuck you to her mother by donating the $90 million of the fortune that remained to charity.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hetty_Green_and_Terrier.jpg