King Con

Every writer is part confidence artist--”come, sit down, read what I have to say”--but Richard Rayner’s credentials as a manipulator of the truth are more impressive than most. Readers of Rayner’s artful memoir “The Blue Suit” will remember his father, a larger-than-life embezzler who faked his death only to reappear years later, swagger intact despite time in jail.

The facts about his father’s life forced Rayner at an early age to repackage his family history for public consumption, and later, at Cambridge, he expanded his trade into book stealing, check forging and burglary. The appeal of “The Blue Suit” lay in Rayner’s ability to tell his own sordid tale of deceit in a voice you couldn’t help trusting.

So it isn’t surprising that the story of Oscar Hartzell would appeal to him. Even without the Barnum-esque superlatives of Rayner’s subtitle, Hartzell was a piece of work. Born in 1876 to a farm family in western Illinois, he thought big from the start, achieving success in livestock but always impatient for “real money.” By his early 30s, he was bankrupt.

Enter Sir Francis Drake--yes, the Elizabethan pirate who circumnavigated the globe, returned to his queen with plundered treasure and died without a son. Three hundred years later, the fantasies of fortune hunters had coalesced into the Drake estate swindle. Its operators promised investors a piece of Drake’s fortune in exchange for a donation to the fund that would help to restore Drake’s rightful heirs. It wasn’t a new scam, but it was a good one, never better than when Hartzell was at the helm.

Hartzell learned of the putative Drake estate when his mother invested $6,500 in the scheme in 1914. Here was the promise of real money, he thought, and signed on as an employee, traveling to England with the couple in charge of the scheme at that time. At this point he was himself a victim of the swindle, though proximity to the perpetrators quickly enlightened him as to their wickedness and their weaknesses: Before long, he had betrayed them and taken over the scam. Safely ensconced in London, he informed the swelling ranks of middle-class Midwestern investors that not only had he located Drake’s true heir but that the man in question had signed over all his rights--to Hartzell, who was engaged to his niece.

Three hundred years of compound interest added up to enough cash, Hartzell wrote, to “buy the three states of Missouri, Kansas and Iowa

The dupes back home seemed to agree. From June 1931 to December 1932, with banks and businesses failing, they showered him with more than $250,000. Hartzell set himself up like a lord--he had a regular table at the Savoy--but in his correspondence he reverted to “cattle pasture language,” careful never to sound like anything but an honest farmer.

He was a brilliant match for the historical moment. The Crash confirmed people’s worst suspicions about Wall Street, making the Drake Estate seem comparatively safe, and it could also be used to explain the payoff’s endless delay. “Our deal is the cause of the depression, having tied up the finances of the whole world,” one of Hartzell’s donors testified at his trial.

Hartzell’s victims adored him despite evidence that he had spent their meager savings on Savile Row suits. To them, he was the “conqueror,” the “benign patriarch,” the “economic redeemer” whose charm reminds Rayner of his father. Even after Hartzell’s deportation, trial, conviction and incarceration at Leavenworth, he was like “Napoleon on Elba,” a hero in exile. Supporters continued to send money, refusing to believe he was in jail.

Hartzell eventually came full circle, living his lie so thoroughly that he became its victim, ending his life in a hospital for the criminally insane. Rayner traces Hartzell’s madness to the moment he returned to America and was confronted by the thousands of investors expecting him to be the man he’d said he was. Whatever the cause, the result was a spectacularly deluded man whose doctor wrote: “He believes himself to be worth 53 billion pounds sterling and to be possessed of a power approaching omnipotence.”

Rayner sees in Hartzell “an emblem of romantic individualism, and capitalism, gone astray.” It’s quite a story, but to remain enthralled by Hartzell at book length, perhaps you need a personal history like Rayner’s. The addictive joy of the grift for Rayner is in the sleight of hand, the nimble dance a step ahead of the law, but the exhaustively researched “Drake’s Fortune” has a tendency toward the flat-footed.

The energy and deft irony of “The Blue Suit” are replaced by earnest exposition on the history of the confidence game or the psychology of the sucker. Rayner’s own voice breaks through too seldom. In telling Hartzell’s story, Rayner confesses, “I’ve sometimes had the feeling that I’ve been writing both a warning to myself and an incitement to riot.” Unfortunately, it’s a feeling he doesn’t quite manage to convey.