Oscar Hartzell's tales of overseas fortunes made others look like amateurs.
In this series we've have already seen examples of early scammers conning their victims with stories of overseas wealth, including Thérèse Humbert's milking of the cream of Parisian Society, Elizabeth Horne's tale of great estates in Madagascar, and Gregor McGregor's sending of gullible investors to their doom in Central America.
But the one who accounted for the largest number of individual victims was probably Oscar Hartzell, who it is estimated conned 70-100,000 investors in the US Midwest in the 1920s and 30s. And it all started in 1572 with the Elizabethan English sailor Francis Drake.
Drake's fortune
Drake, for a large part of his career, was really nothing more than a pirate, and a fair bit of his spent time plundering Spain's South American colonies brought vast fortunes for him, his sponsors, and for the Queen herself. In fact, from one raid, Elizabeth's share alone amounted to £100,000 (the equivalent to a huge sum in today's money). Drake died without children in 1596, and over subsequent centuries all sorts of theories were dreamed up about where the money went, many scammers joined in.
And it was to one such scam that Hartzell, born on an Iowa farm in the 1880s, was exposed. He saw through it immediately, and set about putting his abilities to use in expanding it massively, initially contacting as many people with the name 'Drake' that he could, and asking for money to fund his attempt to regain what was rightfully theirs. Later he extended the scheme to people with different surnames, though how he convinced them they were due a share is not recorded.
Hartzell's story was that Drake's fortune still existed, that it was worth around $100bn at the time and included the entire city of Plymouth, and that it was being fraudulently held by the wrong people. But with enough money to fight his legal case, Hartzell reckoned he could get the money back for its rightful owners, estimating that every $50 donated to him would bring a reward in the order of $100,000.
Off to London
Hartzell himself moved to London, supposedly to pursue his legal claims, and had his army of agents collect donations from back home, sending on the large sums to him, less their own cut. And in return for sending back bogus accounts of his progress, including fake statements from the King and parliament, he lived a grand life in London society.
He wasn't perturbed even when the American embassy in London received notice from the British Home Office that there was no unclaimed Drake inheritance in existence, merely using this as support for his theory that the wealth was illegally in the wrong hands, and once his legal efforts succeeded it would be handed over to a Colonel Drexel Drake and thence on to its vast army of beneficiaries back home in the Midwest.
US authorities, wise to Hartzell's scheme and many other frauds that were common at the time, tried to put a stop to it, but were legally helpless -- Hartzell was doing nothing illegal in the UK, and in the US his legions of victims, who seemed to have an unshakeable trust in him, complained bitterly that they could donate their money to whomever they wanted for any legal purpose.
A push too far
With timing that could hardly have been better, the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote an article in October 1930 arguing in favour of deficit spending in order to help bring the economy out of the Great Depression (employing a strategy that is rather familiar to us today). And in his paper, Keynes just happened to mention the money Queen Elizabeth gained from Drake's exploits, suggesting that her wise investment of it helped form the bedrock of subsequent British economic fortunes.
With no hesitation, Hartzell seized on this and sent out thousands of copies of the article, conflating the two issues and claming Keynes' words provided evidence that the Drake fortune was alive and still growing massively.
At this, and with the new spurt in donations that it brought from desperate victims of the Depression, something had to be done. So eventually, after US authorities leaned heavily on some of Hartzell's agents in the US, and Scotland Yard did similarly with some of his friends in London, enough of a case was made for him to be charged with mail fraud.
In 1933, Hartzell was extradited to Iowa and convicted, receiving a sentence of 10 years in Leavenworth. But such was the near-religious adulation that his followers had for him, his agents still managed to collect around half a million dollars over the course of the next two years.
Hartzell was later diagnosed as being mentally ill, and died in a prison hospital in 1943, with many of his victims never having lost their faith in him.
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