SCAMS, SCANDALS AND SKULLDUGGERY

Jul 11, 2011 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

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P.T. Barnum, the great American showman and circus owner, is credited with the observation, “There’s a sucker born every minute” and he definitely was not referring to banana plants.
Bernard Madoff (pronounced “made off”), the New Yorker who used the Barnum dictum to his advantage, perpetrated the biggest financial fraud in history and “madoff” with about US$50 billion of other people’s money.  Long before Madoff, there was the man whose exploits led to the cynical response to the credulous, “If you believe that, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you.”
The Brooklyn Bridge was completed in 1883 and shortly afterwards a “shifty” 20-year-old named George C. Parker wanted to see if he could get a tourist to the Big Apple to buy the bridge.  The tourist bit and a full-fledged scam was started.  It was so easy that Parker dropped all his other scams and went into selling the Brooklyn Bridge full-time.  Parker’s approach was to walk up to a prospective “mark” and introduce himself as the owner of the bridge.  He told the person that he was planning to set up a toll booth and offered the person a job to collect the tolls.
So persuasive was Parker that the naïve tourist would eventually offer to buy the bridge, set up the booth and keep the toll money.  People paid Parker amounts ranging from US$50 to US$5,000 for the bridge.  Parker was so bold that he allowed the unsuspecting tourist to pay in instalments.
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader says, “Some of his (Parker’s) victims paid him regularly for months before they realized they’d been had; and more than once, police had to be called to the bridge to prevent its latest ‘owner’ from erecting a toll barrier.”  Parker ran the scam from 1883 to 1928 (45 years) before he was sentenced to life in the notorious Sing-Sing prison.
A year after Parker was convicted, a man calling himself “T. Remington Grenfall” from “The Grand Central Holding Corporation” sold two brothers, fruit sellers Tony and Nick Fortunato, the information booth of New York’s Grand Central Station.  Mr. Grenfall explained that the booth would no longer be in use and he was authorised to rent out the space to fruit merchants.
The Fortunatos were happy to hear they were at the top of the list of prospective tenants and they handed over a cheque for US$100,000 to Grenfall’s partner “Wilson A. Blodgett” who purported to be the President of the Company.
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader commented, “Grenfall and Blodgett were never caught, and the Fortunato brothers never got their money back or took possession of the information booth. They did, however, become a semi-regular tourist attraction. For years afterward they returned periodically to the train station to yell at officials and intimidate the clerks in the information booths. New Yorkers began taking out-of-town guest to the station in hopes of witnessing the spectacle.”
In 1925, a Czech con artist named Victor Lustig found out that the Eiffel Tower needed major repairs.  He went to Paris and posed as “Deputy Director-General of the Ministry of Mail and Telegraphs.”  He got in touch with six of France’s biggest scrap iron dealers and invited them to a meeting where he told them that the Government was going to tear down the tower because it was too expensive to maintain.
Because of the fear of a popular uprising over the destruction of the tower, he swore the dealers to secrecy and then invited bids for the demolition and salvage.  He asked for and received a US$100,000 bribe from one of the dealers and quickly boarded a train to Vienna.  The dealer did not contact the police so Lustig returned to France and sold the tower for the second time to one of the other dealers.  When this one reported the matter to the police, Lustig left for the greener pastures of the U.S. where he continued his con-man career.
In 2008, The Times newspaper highlighted “Ten Of The World’s Greatest Frauds.”  They started with Charles Ponzi who begat Madoff and Stanford. Kenneth Lay of Enron was second on the list for a US$60million fraud and was followed by rogue trader Nick Leeson who caused Barings, the oldest merchant bank, to collapse in 1995.
Alves des Reis forged today’s equivalent of US$150 trillion in Portugese escudos and then laundered the money for 25% of the value.
Jerôme Kerviel was another rogue trader, this time with European Bank, Société Générale, and perpetrated a US$5billion fraud in 1998.  Two media moguls, Bernard Ebbers and Conrad Black, are on the list.  Then there is Graham Halksworth who would have been the world’s biggest ever fraudster but was caught when he tried to authenticate $2.5 trillion of US Treasury bonds that he claimed had been secretly issued by the US government in the thirties to undermine the Communist revolution in China.  The former Scotland Yard scientist was jailed for six years in 2003.
Recently in Australia a company advertised imported hard core pornographic videos.  The prices seemed reasonable so people placed orders and paid by cheque.  After several weeks, the company wrote back explaining that under the present law they were unable to supply the materials and did not wish to be prosecuted.  They returned their customers’ money in the form of company cheques.  Due to the name of the company, few people were willing to present these cheques to their banks. The name of the company: “The Anal Sex and Fetish Perversion Company.”
In looking at the list of scams, scandals and skulduggery, it is easy to believe that we in the West Indies are fortunate never to have a scam like that.  However, in thinking about it, one has to wonder how an organisation which represents just a minuscule number of people, less than .0000001  percent of the West Indian population, and which does not own a cricket ground, a player or even a pitch roller, can end up owning West Indies Cricket.
Granted that it is a situation that has arisen and has been tolerated for almost 90 years by the people of the Caribbean, one still has to wonder how it has been allowed to exist for so long.  If you or anyone you know believe that the West Indies Cricket Board is the legitimate owner of West Indies Cricket, I’ve got a bridge to sell you, toll-free.
*Tony Deyal is now convinced that psychics are the biggest scammers of all. He almost had a psychic girlfriend but when she found out he was broke she left him before they met.

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