Crime and Punishment – Historical Easter Eggs

March 14, 1964 Tales from the Skyline Lounge

The camera captured the shock and surprise on the victim’s face, similar I’m sure to that which crossed the faces of four musicians watching it all , on TV. The shooter was the same man they had worked for just a few months earlier, at that burned out dive bar, called the Skyline lounge.

Jacob Leon Rubenstein was a troubled child, growing up on the west side of Chicago. Marked a juvenile delinquent from his earliest adolescence, Rubenstein was arrested for truancy at age 11, eventually skipping enough school to spend time at the Institute of Juvenile Research.

Many who knew Jacob Rubenstein called him “Sparky”, a nickname shared with Peanuts creator, Charles M Shulz. Any similarity between the two ended there. Some say the sobriquet came from an uncanny resemblance to “Sparkplug”, the old nag with the patchwork blanket, from the Snuffy Smith cartoon strip. Be that as it may Rubenstein hated the nickname and was quick to fight anyone who called him that. It may have been that quick temper, that made the hated name stick.

Rubinstein spent the early 40s at racetracks in Chicago and California, until being drafted into the Army Air Forces, in 1943. Honorably discharged in 1946, he returned to Chicago, before moving to Dallas the following year.

Rubenstein managed a series of seedy Dallas nightclubs and strip joints, featuring ladies like “Candy Barr” and “Chris Colt and her ’45’s”. Somewhere along the line this towering figure from the early 1960s Dallas hospitality scene shortened his name, to “Ruby”.

Ruby dabbled in all manner of underworld activities such as gambling, narcotics and prostitution. There were even rumored associations with Mafia boss Santo Trafficante. The lower crust of the Dallas police force knew Ruby was always good for free booze, prostitutes, and other favors. This was one unsavory guy.

Today, you may know Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson and Robbie Robertson as musicians touring with Bob Dylan in 1965 who later morphed into “The Band”, and performed such rock & roll standards as “The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down”, “Up on Cripple Creek” and “The Weight”.

In early days, the joints these guys played were so rough they performed with blackjacks, hidden in special pockets sewn into their coats.

In 1963, they played a week in a Fort Worth nightclub. It was a huge venue but no one was there that first night save for two couples, a couple of drunk waiters and a one-armed go-go dancer. The band wasn’t through their first set before a fight broke out, and someone was tear-gassed. The band played on, coughing and choking with teargas wafting across the stage, faces wet with tears.

Part of the roof had either blown off this joint, or burned off, depending on which version you accept. Jack, the owner, tore off the rest of it and kept the insurance money calling this fine establishment , the “Skyline Lounge”.

Even without the roof Jack saw no need to pay for security. He told the musicians “Boys, this building ain’t exactly secure enough for you to leave your musical equipment unattended.” Band members were told they’d best stay overnight, with guns, lest anyone come over the wall. Problem solved.

Months later, the country was stunned at the first Presidential assassination in over a half-century. I was 5½ at the time and I remember it, to this day. An hour after the shooting, former marine and defector to the Soviet Union Lee Harvey Oswald killed Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit, who had stopped him for questioning. Thirty minutes later, Oswald was arrested in a movie theater.

By Sunday, November 24, Oswald was formally charged with the murders of President John F. Kennedy and Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit. He was taken to the basement of Dallas police headquarters where an armored car awaited, to transport the prisoner to a more secure county jail. It was never meant to be.

The scene was crowded with press and police. If you were alive that day you probably remember, half the country watched it on live TV. A lone man came out of the crowd and fired a single bullet from his .38 revolver into the belly of Lee Harvey Oswald.

The camera captured the shock and surprise on Oswald’s face, similar I’m sure to that which crossed the faces of four musicians watching it all, on TV. The shooter was the same man they had worked for just a few months earlier, at that burned out dive bar, called the Skyline lounge. Jack Ruby.

Oswald was transported unconscious to Parkland Memorial Hospital, the same hospital where John F. Kennedy had died, only two days earlier. He was dead in two hours.

Jack Ruby was sentenced to death in the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, on March 14, 1964. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the conviction in October 1966, on the grounds that the trial should have taken place in a different county from where his high profile crime had taken place.

Ruby died of lung cancer the following January, while awaiting retrial. The Warren Commission found no evidence linking Jack Ruby’s murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, to any broader conspiracy to assassinate the President.

In 1973 the Jack Ruby inspired a thoroughly forgettable band to take the same name unless that happens to be, your “thing”. Whatever became of Jacob Leon “Sparky” Rubenstein’s fine Dallas establishment will be left left to the more scandalous bits, of our imagination.

February 20, 1942 Father and Son

Eddie was a mob lawyer who testified against his boss and paid for it, with his life. Eddie’s son Butch went on to be the first Ace of WW2 and recipient, of the Medal of Honor.

We’ve all heard the story of the mob lawyer who had everything but a good name, and gave it all up to show his son. That personal integrity is more important than all the riches of the underworld. His name was “Easy Eddie”. Eddie went on to testify against Al Capone, the most notorious gangster in the history of the underworld. Eddie paid for it with his life. Eddie’s son “Butch” learned the lesson his father taught from beyond the grave and went on to become a world War 2 WWII flying ace, and recipient of the Medal of Honor.

The story is true more or less, but it does lays on the morality, a little thick.

Edward Joseph O’Hare, “EJ” to friends and family, passed the Missouri bar exam in 1923 and joined a law firm. Operating dog tracks in Chicago, Boston and Miami, O’Hare made a considerable fortune working for Owen Smith, the high commissioner for the International Greyhound Racing Association. He’s the guy who patented the mechanical rabbit used in dog racing. EJ and Selma Anna (Lauth) O’Hare had three children together between 1914 and 1924, – Edward (“Butch”), Patricia, and Marilyn.

EJ developed an interest in flying in the 1920s, once even hitching a ride on Charles Lindbergh’s mail plane. For a time he worked as pilot for Robertson Aircraft, occasionally giving his teenage son a turn at the controls.

One day, EJ came home to find 13-year -old Butch sprawled on the couch, munching on donuts and banana layer cake. He enrolled the boy in the Western Military Academy in Alton, Illinois. The kid was getting way too lazy.

EJ and Selma divorced in 1927. Eddie left St. Louis for good moving to Chicago while Butch stayed with his mother, attending WMA. It was there the elder O’Hare met Al Capone and later earned his second fortune working as the gangster’s business manager and lawyer.

In 1930, O’Hare approached John Rogers, a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, asking that he arrange a meeting with the Internal Revenue Service, then in pursuit of Capone on grounds of tax evasion.

It all could have been to restore his good name, or maybe Eddie saw the writing on the wall. Some will tell you he HAD to get right since no Congressman would nominate the son of a gangster, to the nation’s premier naval academy.

Who knows, maybe it’s all of the above. None of them are mutually exclusive. Whatever the motivation, IRS Agent Wilson later said of EJ “On the inside of the gang I had one of the best undercover men I have ever known: Eddie O’Hare.”

Al Capone was convicted of tax evasion in 1931 and sentenced to Alcatraz, becoming eligible for early release in 1939 due to syphilitic dementia. A week before the gangster’s release, EJ left his office at Sportsman’s Park racetrack in Cicero, driving his black ’39 Lincoln Zephyr. Two shotgun wielding gunmen pulled alongside, firing a volley of big game slugs and killing O’Hare, instantly. No arrest was ever made.

Butch had graduated from the Naval Academy at Annapolis by this time, receiving his duty assignment aboard the USS New Mexico. Shortly after his father’s assassination, the younger O’Hare began flight training at Naval Air Station in Pensacola.

Assigned to the USS Saratoga’s Fighting Squadron, Butch O’Hare made his first carrier landing in 1940, describing the experience as “just about the most exciting thing a pilot can do in peacetime.”

Butch O’Hare became the first American flying Ace of WWII on February 20, 1942.

The carrier Lexington was discovered by Japanese reconnaissance aircraft, 450 miles outside of Rabaul. Six Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters and Lexington’s anti-aircraft guns were engaged with an incoming formation of nine Japanese bombers when nine more bombers were reported incoming.

Six more Wildcats roared off the flight deck of the Lexington, one piloted by Butch O’Hare. He and his wingman Marion William “Duff” Dufilho were the first to spot the V formation, diving to the intercept and leaving the other four fighters too far away to affect the outcome. Dufilho’s guns jammed, leaving Butch O’Hare alone on the unprotected side of his flotilla. One fighter against nine enemy bombers flying in tight V formation, mutually protecting one another with rear-facing machine guns.

O’Hare’s Wildcat had four 50-caliber guns with 450 rounds apiece, enough to fire for about 34 seconds. What followed was so close to the Lexington, that pilots could hear the carrier’s AA guns. Full throttle and diving from the high side, O’Hare fired short, accurate bursts, the outermost bomber’s right-hand engine literally jumping from its mount. Ducking to the other side and smashing the port engine on another “Betty”, O’Hare’s Wildcat attacked one bomber after another, single handedly taking out five bombers with an average of only 60 rounds apiece.

O’Hare’s Medal of Honor citation calls the performance “…one of the most daring, if not the most daring, single action in the history of combat aviation…”

In a confused night action in the darkness of November 26, 1943, Butch O’Hare stepped from the pages of history. Some say he was cut down by friendly fire, mistakenly shot down by TBF Avenger gunner Alvin B. Kernan. Others say it was a lucky shot by a gunner aboard his old adversary, a Rikko (Betty) bomber. Yet another theory was that O’Hare’s Hellcat caught a wingtip on a wave and cartwheeled into the ocean.

On September 19, 1949, the Orchard Depot Airport in Chicago was renamed in tribute to the fallen Ace. O’Hare International Airport. Neither his body nor his aircraft were ever recovered.

December 30, 1610 The Blood Countess

She’s the most prolific female serial killer of all time. The Guinness Book of World Records, says she is.

The “Blood Countess” Erzsébet (Elizabeth) Báthory is the most prolific female serial killer in history. The Guinness book of World Records says she is, bathing in the blood of as many as 650 virgins to keep her skin looking young.

Servants were convicted of killing 80 while Erzsébet herself was neither tried nor convicted, due to her rank. She was walled up in prison and left to die, the most prolific female murderer, in history. A woman whose bestiality has elevated from mere mortal to semi-supernatural, vampiric ghoul.

So…was she?

According to one story a servant girl once noted a few hairs out of place on the countess’ head. The noblewoman struck the girl so hard that great gouts of blood sprayed across her ladyship’s face. Báthory noticed how the blood seemed to rejuvenate the skin. Thus began the murder of 650 maidens to bathe, in their blood.

Other versions describe the blood landing on the skin of her hand and still others a belief on the countess’ part that only the blood of noble women, would have such rejuvenating effects.

A problem arises, with the absence of contemporary accounts. The tale of the blood bath first came out over a hundred years, after her death. Secondly, we all know how quickly the stuff clots and congeals, once leaving the body. Aside from the repulsiveness of the act does such a goopy coagulated mess seem suitable, for a bath?

Elizabeth lived from August 7, 1560 to August 21, 1614, a member of the powerful Báthory clan of Transylvania, an area which now includes parts of Hungary, Romania and the Slovak Republic. Her uncle was the King of Poland, her nephew, a voivode (prince) of Transylvania.

The future Hungarian war hero Ferenc Nádasdy was betrothed to Báthory when he was fourteen and she, ten rears old. The couple wed when he was nineteen and she fifteen and, as the Báthory clan outranked the Nádasdy she kept her name and he added it, to his own.

Theirs was a time and place closer to the fall of Constantinople than World War 1 is, to our own. It was an age of ever aggressive expansion of the Ottoman Empire. A time and place not so greatly removed from that of Vlad (The Impaler) Țepeș, a man of such freakishly extreme cruelty as to spawn the legend, of Count Dracula.

The Ottoman-Hungarian wars were never ending at this time and Ferenc spent more time fighting abroad than at home. He soon earned the sobriquet “Black Knight”, likely for excessive cruelty extended, to Ottoman prisoners.

Back at home Elizabeth managed the family estates including no fewer than seventeen villages and living at the Nádasdy castles at Sárvár, Hungary and Čachtice in what is now, the Slovak Republic.

Due to Ferenc’s frequent absence the marriage would fail to produce a child, for the first ten years. In time there would be five, two daughters dying in infancy with two more daughters and a son, growing to adulthood.

According to some stories, Elizabeth would write to her husband asking for the gruesome details of the torture, inflicted on prisoners. She was seen for a time as a benevolent ruler but that began to change, in 1602.

The stories make for difficult reading, tales of servant girls smeared with honey and left to be devoured by insects. Tales of stark naked girls made to stand in pails of water until they froze to death and mutilations carried out with scissors, knives and hot pokers and even Elizabeth’s own, teeth.

The higher ranking members of the servants’ corps would fan out across those seventeen villages to recruit a never ending supply of young girls, to the castle. None of it bothered the authorities all that much as even treatments so gruesome as these were alright, so long as they were carried out among the lower classes.

In 1604 the Black Knight died while in battle allegedly, of some unknown disease. Despite the rumors Elizabeth’s henchmen fed an ever increasing stream of young girls to the castle, increasingly, girls of the lesser nobility.

Now if the murder of a peasant girl is alright, killing a member of a Family of Rank™, is not. Questions asked about disappearances were met with implausible yarns about murder-suicides and sudden illness always conveniently followed, by the rapid disposal of the corpse.

Count György Thurzó was the Lord Palatine of Hungary, the personal representative of the monarch and as such, responsible for investigation. On December 29, 1610 according to some stories he surprised the blood soaked countess in the very act of tormenting, one of her victims. The following day, December 30, she was arrested.

Whether there were 36 victims or 50 or 650 all depended, on whom you ask. Judicial proceedings decided on the number, eighty. Accused of being accomplices servants Dorothy Szentes, Helena Jo and John Ujvary were all sentenced to death for helping Báthory to lure and murder her victims. The women had their fingers pulled off with hot pincers before being burned alive. John was beheaded and then, burned.

Ever obsessed with rank, the authorities didn’t try Báthory herself but instead walled her up in a small space in the Castle Čachtice, with only openings, for food and water. There she lingered for another four years until the morning of August 14, 1614 when she was found dead, on the floor.

Was Elizabeth Báthory guilty of the crimes laid against her? There is too much consistency among too many stories, to absolve her of her misdeeds. Not entirely. There were too many tales telling the same story for the woman to be entirely innocent but two things can be true at the same time, right?

Báthory was at odds with some powerful people. Her support of her cousin Prince Gábor Báthory of Transylvania put her in conflict with the mighty Habsburg Empire who just happened to owe the woman, money. A LOT of money and, happily, Báthory’s exile made it all, go away. It is reasponsible to view with jaundiced eye any story, told under torture. Furthermore, 250 of the 289 eyewitness accounts used against her contained nothing more than hearsay with no real information, whatsoever. Many witnesses owed Count Thurzó personally and he had exclusive authority, over the proceedings. Lastly, the testament of the widow Báthory left her estates, to her children. The Báthory-Nádasdy offspring were banished from Hungary following her incarceration. Some would return in 1640 but by that time the family name had lost, its former nobility.

More than a tale of cops and robbers this one seems more like two scorpions in a jar and only one coming out, alive. A story about bad guys vs other bad guys not unlike certain current events, of today. Unless of course you’re one who believes that Jeffrey Epstein, really did kill himself.

November 18, 1978 Jonestown

The visit of the 17th was cordial at first, with Jones himself hosting a reception in the central pavilion. Underlying menace soon came to the surface as a few Temple members expressed the desire, to leave with the delegation.

Those who remember him as a child spoke of a “really weird kid“, obsessed with religion and death. He’d hold elaborate, pseudo-religious ceremonies at the house, mostly funerals for small animals. How James Warren Jones got all those dead animals, was a matter for dark speculation.

It was depression-era rural Indiana, in the age of racial segregation. Father and son often clashed over issues of race. The two didn’t talk to each other for years one time, after the time the elder Jones refused to let one of his son’s black friends, into the house.

Jim Jones was a bright boy, graduating High School with honors, in 1949. He was a voracious reader, studying the works of Stalin, Marx, Mao, Gandhi and Hitler and carefully noting the strengths and weaknesses, of each.

Jones married Marceline Baldwin in 1949 and moved to Bloomington, Indiana, where he attended Indiana University and later Butler University night school, earning a degree in secondary education.

A long-standing interest in leftist politics heightened during this period, when Jones became a regular at Communist Party-USA meetings. There he would rail against the McCarthy hearings, and the trials of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Jones recalled he later asked himself, “How can I demonstrate my Marxism? The thought was, infiltrate the church.”

“Reverend” Jim Jones got his start as a student pastor at the Sommerset Southside Methodist Church but soon left, over issues of segregation. This was the age of Jim Crow and Jones, was a Social Justice Warrior .

The New York Times reported in 1953, “declaring that he was outraged at what he perceived as racial discrimination in his white congregation, Mr. Jones established his own church and pointedly opened it to all ethnic groups. To raise money, he imported monkeys and sold them door to door as pets.”

Jones witnessed a faith-healing service and came to understand the influence to be had, from such an event. He arranged a massive convention in 1956, inviting the Oral Roberts of his day, as keynote speaker. Reverend William Branham did not disappoint. Soon, Reverend Jones opened his own mission with an explicit focus on racial integration.

Thus began the Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ.

Jones’ integrationist politics did little to ingratiate himself in 1950s rural Indiana. Mayor and commissioners alike asked him to tone it down, while he received wild applause at NAACP and Urban League conventions with speeches rising to a thundering crescendo: “Let My People GO!!!”

Jones spoke in favor of Kim Il-sung’s invasion of South Korea, branding the conflict a “war of liberation” and calling South Korea “a living example of all that socialism in the north has overcome.”

Jim and Marcelline adopted three Korean orphans, beginning what would become a family of nine including their only biological child, Stephan Ghandi. The couple adopted a black boy in 1961 and called him Jim Jr., the Jones’ “rainbow family” a reflection of the pastor’s congregation.

An apocalyptic streak began to show, as Jones preached of nuclear annihilation. He traveled to Brazil for a time, in search of a safe place for the coming holocaust. He even gave it a date: July 15, 1967. On returning from Brazil, the “Father” spoke to his flock. Jones’ “children” would have to move. To northern California, to a new and perfect, socialist, Eden.

4710360004_3f8f97efbd_o — Jim Jones preaching, 1971

For Jim Jones, religion was never more than a means to an end. ”Off the record” he once said in a recorded conversation, “I don’t believe in any loving God. Our people, I would say, are ninety percent atheist. Uh, we— we think Jesus Christ was a swinger…I must say, I felt somewhat hypocritical for the last years as I became uh, an atheist, uh, I have become uh, you— you feel uh, tainted, uh, by being in the church situation. But of course, everyone knows where I’m at. My bishop knows that I’m an atheist.“

Faith healing. The California days

Jones referred to himself as the reincarnation of Mohandas Gandhi. Father Divine. Jesus, Gautama Buddha and Lenin, all rolled into one. “What you need to believe in is what you can see…. If you see me as your friend, I’ll be your friend. As you see me as your father, I’ll be your father, for those of you that don’t have a father…. If you see me as your savior, I’ll be your savior. If you see me as your God, I’ll be your God.”

The years in California were a time of rapid expansion from Temple Headquarters in San Francisco to locations up and down the “Golden State”. Jones hobnobbed with the who’s who of Democratic politics, from San Francisco Mayor George Moscone to Presidential candidate Walter Mondale. Even First Lady Rosalynn Carter.

“If you’re born in capitalist America, racist America, fascist America, then you’re born in sin. But if you’re born in socialism, you’re not born in sin.”
Jim Jones

California Assemblyman Willie Brown called Jones a combination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Albert Einstein and Mao Tse Tung. Harvey Milk wrote to Jones after one visit: “Rev Jim, It may take me many a day to come back down from the high that I reach today. I found something dear today. I found a sense of being that makes up for all the hours and energy placed in a fight. I found what you wanted me to find. I shall be back. For I can never leave.”

Jim_Jones_shakes_hands_with_Cecil_Williams_-_January_1977 — “Jones receives a Martin Luther King, Jr. Humanitarian award from Pastor Cecil Williams, 1977” H/T Wikipedia

Meanwhile, Jones was building the perfect socialist utopia in the South American jungles of Guyana, formally known as the “Peoples Temple Agricultural Project”. Most simply called the place, “Jonestown”.

San Francisco Chronicle reporter Marshall Kilduff wrote in the summer of 1977, telling a grotesque tale of physical and sexual abuse, of brainwashing and emotional domination. Chronicle editors balked and Kilduff published the piece in the New West Magazine.

That was when Jones and his congregation left town and fled. To Guyana.

A long standing drug addiction became more pronounced in Jonestown where the preacher spoke of the gospel of “Translation”, a weird crossing over from this life to some other, finer, plane.

Some 68 percent of Jonestown faithful were black at this time, congregants who somehow got something from this place, they couldn’t get at home. Inclusion. Fulfillment. Acceptance. Whatever it was, the cult of Jonestown was mostly, a world of willing participants.

Mostly, but not entirely. Those who entered Jonestown were not allowed to leave. Those who escaped told outlandish tales of abuse: mental, physical and sexual.

Former members of the Temple formed a “Concerned Relatives” group in the Fall of 1977, to publicize conditions afflicting family members, still in the cult.

1506309501695-jonestown-commune — Jonestown compound, Guyana

Concerned Relatives produced a packet of affidavits in April 1978, entitled “Accusation of Human Rights Violations by Rev. James Warren Jones“. Jones’ political support began to weaken as members of the press and Congress, took increasing interest.

California Congressman Leo Ryan led a fact-finding mission that November, to see things for himself. The Congressional Delegation (CoDel) arrived at the Guyanese capital on November 15, with NBC camera crew and newspaper reporters, in tow.

a35dea6f-37bc-473b-977f-b1edb580da9d — Congressman Ryan arrives at Jonestown

The delegation traveled by air and drove the last few miles to Jonestown, by limo. The visit of the 17th was cordial at first, with Jones himself hosting a reception in the central pavilion. Underlying menace soon came to the surface as a few Temple members expressed the desire, to leave with the delegation. Things went from bad to worse when temple member Don Sly attacked Congressman Ryan with a knife, the following day.

BobBrownKaituma — NBC photographer Bob Brown took this shot, of the shooters

Ryan’s hurried exit with fifteen members of the Temple met with no resistance. At first. The CoDel was boarding at the small strip in Port Kaituma, when Jones’ “Red Brigade” pulled up in a farm tractor, towing a trailer. The new arrivals opened fire, killing Congressman Ryan and four others. One of the supposed “defectors” produced a weapon and wounded, several more.

Back at the compound, Jones lost an already tenuous grasp on reality.

Fearing assault by parachute, lethal doses of cyanide were distributed along with grape “Flavor Aid” for 900-plus members of the People’s Temple, including 304 children.

This wasn’t the first time the Jonestown flock believed they were ingesting poison, for The Cause. It was about to be the last.

Jones spoke with an odd lisp which seemed to grow more pronounced, at times of excitement. You can hear it in the 45 minute “death tape“ below, his words sometimes forming a perfect “S“ and at other times, lapsing into a soft “TH” or some combination, of the two.

You can hear it clearly, in the recording. Heads up dear reader. If you care to listen, it’s 45-minutes of tough sledding.

Jonestown “Death Tape” November 18, 1978

909 people lost their lives in the murder/suicide of November 18, 1978, at the Jonestown compound, the Kaituma air strip and the Temple-run building in the Guyanese capital city, of Georgetown. It was the largest loss of civilian life in American history, until the Islamist terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Jones: How very much I’ve loved you. How very much I’ve tried, to give you the good life…We are sitting on a powder keg…I don’t think that’s what we wanted to do with our babies…No man takes my life from me, I lay my life down…If we can’t live in peace, then let us die in peace.
Christine [Miller]: Is it too late for Russia?
Jones: Here’s why it’s too late for Russia. They killed. They started to kill. That’s why it makes it too late for Russia. Otherwise I’d said, “Russia, you bet your life.” But it’s too late.
Unidentified Man: Is there any way if I go, that it’ll help?
Jones: No, you’re not going. You’re not going.
Crowd: No! No!
Jones: I haven’t seen anybody yet that didn’t die. And I’d like to choose my own kind of death for a change. I’m tired of being tormented to hell, that’s what I’m tired of.
Crowd: Right, right.
Jones: Tired of it.
Unidentified Man: It’s over, sister, it’s over … we’ve made that day … we made a beautiful day and let’s make it a beautiful day … that’s what I say.

“A lot of people are tired around here, but I’m not sure they’re ready to lie down, stretch out and fall asleep”. Jim Jones

August 21, 1911 That Smile

Artistic types are fond of talking about the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa, the “Gioconda smile”, and what it may mean. Perhaps it’s nothing more than the sad smile of a mother who lost a daughter in 1499 before giving birth to a son, in 1502.

Something like 7.8 billion people lived on this planet in 2020, roughly 7 percent of all those, who have ever lived. In all that humanity precious few have ever been known in all times and all places, by a single name. Napoleon. Michelangelo. Ghandi. Leonardo.

Funny how many of them, are Italian Renaissance guys.

The Italian polymath Leonardo, the illegitimate son of a teenage orphan named Caterina, painted his most famous work (Italian Monna Lisa) in stages, between 1503, and 1506. Evidence suggests he was adding finishing touches, as late as 1517.

Self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci. (Credit: DEA / A. DAGLI ORTI/Getty Images)

Mona Lisa was painted in oil on a panel of poplar wood, measuring thirty inches by twenty-one. It’s a very small object to hold the Guinness World Record for highest insurance valuation: US $100 million in 1962, equivalent to $870 million, in 2021.

The model is believed to be Lisa Gherardini, an Italian noblewoman otherwise little known, to history. She was married in her teens to Francesco del Giocondo, a much older merchant of cloth and silk who lived an ordinary middle-class life in which she bore him, five children.

Artistic types are fond of talking about that “enigmatic smile” of the Mona Lisa, the “Gioconda smile”, and what it may mean. Perhaps it’s nothing more than the sad smile of a mother who lost a daughter in 1499 before giving birth to a son, in 1502.

Leonardo could stare at a portrait for hours on end before adding a single brush stroke, and walking away. It may explain why Mona Lisa remains “Non-Finito”. Not finished. This in turn may explain why the artist never gave the portrait to the Giocondo family. He was never paid.

In the last years of his life Leonardo suffered some sort of paralysis, on his right side. While that didn’t impede the left-handed artist’s sketching, to stand for long periods and hold a painter’s palette, proved increasingly difficult.

It is believed Leonardo willed the portrait to his favorite apprentice Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, better known as Salaì, but the artist died, in France. So it is the most famous painting in the world, “La Jaconde”, remains in French hands from that day, to this.

Sort of.

When the French Revolution abolished the Royal Family, Mona Lisa made her way to the Louvre. She lived for a time in Napoleon’s bedroom in the Tuileries Palace. During the Franco Prussian war of 1879-’81 she was moved to the arsenal at Brest, for safekeeping.

On August 21, 1911, Mona Lisa disappeared from the Louvre.

Sunday August 20 was a big social night, in Paris. Come Monday morning half the city, was hung over. Three Italian handymen were not hung over though they may have been, tired. The three hid out when the museum closed and spent the night, in an art supply closet.

ITALY – CIRCA 2002: Theft of the Mona Lisa. Illustrator Achille Beltrame (1871-1945), from La Domenica del Corriere, 3rd-10th September 1911. (Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images)

With the Louvre still closed the trio lifted 200 pounds of painting, frame and protective glass from the wall. Then it was off to the Quai d’Orsay station to catch the 7:47 train, out of town.

Dorothy and Tom Hoobler wrote about the heist in a book, called The Crimes of Paris. According to these two it was 28 hours before anyone noticed, those four bare hooks.

The man who noticed was himself an artist, painting a portrait of the gallery itself. Even then there was no cause for alarm. The museum had a project at that time, to photograph every painting in the gallery. The cameras of the day didn’t photograph well indoors, so it was that each work was brought to the roof, to be photographed.

A fussy little man, the artist “just couldn’t work”, without that portrait in place. He persuaded a guard to find out when Mona Lisa was coming back down, from the roof.

Oops.

Masterpiece of Renaissance Italian art though she might be the Mona Lisa was barely known, outside of art circles. Now that all changed. The New York Times’ headline all but screamed from the front page, “60 Detectives Seek Stolen ‘Mona Lisa,’ French Public Indignant.”

Literally overnight, Mona Lisa became the most famous painting, on the planet.

The French art world was convinced at this time that evil American millionaires, were buying up French art. Never mind Mona Lisa was an Italian piece, but I digress…

American tycoon and art collector John Pierpont Morgan was suspected in the theft as was the Spanish artist, Pablo Picasso. The international tinderbox which brought a world to war in 1914 awaited only the right matchstick, in 1911. Maybe the Kaiser did it.

Meanwhile the three Italians who really DID steal Mona Lisa, two brothers, Vincenzo and Michele Lancelotti and the ringleader, Vincenzo Perugia (who just happened to be the guy who built that protective glass case in the first place), didn’t know what to do.

They thought they could sell the thing, maybe even repatriate the portrait, to Italy. Now Mona Lisa was too hot, to hawk.

Twenty-eight months came and went with Mona Lisa, in a trunk. Finally, Perugia approached an art dealer, in Florence.

They said they’d get back to him but it wasn’t a half hour, before the police were at his door. Perugia claimed to be an Italian Patriot, just trying to bring Mona Lisa home. Where she belonged.

He was sentenced to eight months, for the theft.

Somewhere around this time, an Archduke was assassinated, in Sarajevo. World War 1 began just a few days, after Perugia‘s trial.

History has a way of swallowing some events whole. As if they had never happened. Like the early Monday morning in 1911 when that most famous of smiles, just disappeared.

July 30, 1916 Sabotage

[B]etween 1915 and spring 1917, 43 American factories suffered explosions or fires of mysterious origin, in addition to the bombs set on some four dozen ships carrying war supplies to the Allies”

In the early months of the Great War, Britain’s Royal Navy swept the high seas of the Kaiser’s surface ships and blockaded ports in Germany. The United States was neutral at this time, when over a hundred German ships sought refuge in American harbors.

The blockade made it impossible for the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary to import war materiel from overseas while Great Britain, France, and Russia continued to buy products from US farms and factories. American businessmen were happy to sell to any foreign customer who had the cash but, for all intents and purposes, such trade was limited to the allies.

To the Central Powers, such trade had the sole purpose of killing their boys, fighting for the Fatherland on the battlefields of Europe.

The first and most overt reaction from the Kaiser came in the form of unrestrained submarine warfare, when even vessels flying the flags of neutral nations came under attack. Less apparent at that time was the covert campaign of sabotage carried out by German, agents on US soil.

“Black Tom” was originally an island in New York Harbor, next to Liberty Island. So called after a former resident, by WWI, landfill had expanded the island to become part of Jersey City. The area contained a mile-long pier with warehouses and rail lines operated by the Lehigh Valley Railroad, and served as a major hub in the trade of war materiel to the allies.

Sanitary_&_Topographical_Map_of_Hudson_County,_N.J — Black Tom Island, 1880

On July 30, 1916, the Black Tom terminal had over two million pounds of small arms and artillery ammunition in freight cars, and one hundred thousand pounds of TNT on a nearby Barge.

In the small hours of the morning, around 2:00am, guards discovered a series of small fires. Some tried to put them out while others fled, fearing an explosion. The first and loudest blast took place at 2:08am, a detonation so massive as to be estimated at 5.5, on the Richter scale. People were awakened from Maryland to Connecticut in what many thought was an earthquake. The Brooklyn Bridge shook. The walls of Jersey City’s municipal building were cracked as shrapnel flew through the air. Windows broke as far as 25 miles away, while fragments embedded themselves in the clock tower at the Jersey Journal building in Journal Square, over a mile away. The clock stopped at 2:12 am.

Black_Tom_explosion_-_firefighters_-_1916 — Firefighters were unable to fight the fires until the bullets and shrapnel stopped flying. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Stained Glass windows were shattered at St. Patrick’s Church, and Ellis Island was evacuated to Manhattan. Damage to the skirt and torch carried by the Statue of Liberty alone, came to over $2¼ million in 2017 dollars. To this day the ladder to “Lady Liberty’s” torch remains off limits, to visitors.

The enormous vaulted ceiling of Ellis Island’s main hall, collapsed. According to one Park officer, damage to the Ellis Island complex came to $500,000 “half the one million dollars it cost the government to build the facility.”

Known fatalities in the explosion included a Jersey City police officer, a Lehigh Valley Railroad Chief of Police, a ten week old infant, and the barge captain.

The explosion at Black Tom nearly brought the US into the war against Germany, but that would wait for the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. That, and a telegram from German Secretary for Foreign Affairs Arthur Zimmermann, promising US territories to Mexico, in exchange for a declaration of war against the US.

Black Tom was the most spectacular, but by no means the only such act of sabotage. The archive at cia.gov states that “[B]etween 1915 and spring 1917, 43 American factories suffered explosions or fires of mysterious origin, in addition to the bombs set on some four dozen ships carrying war supplies to the Allies”.

Responsibility for the Black Tom explosion was never proven, conclusively. Early suspicions centered on accidental causes. Legal wrangling would climb the judicial ladder all the way to the United States Supreme Court and continue well into the second World War. Anna Rushnak, an elderly Czech immigrant who ran a four-bits-a-night boarding house in Bayonne was thrown from her bed by the explosion, to find then-23-year-old Michael Kristoff sitting on the edge of his bed, mumbling “What I do? What I do?”

View_of_the_debris_of_the_Lehigh_Valley_pier_after_Black_Tom_explosion_(cropped) — Lehigh Valley Railroad pier, after the explosion

Kristoff, a Slovakian subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany’s principle ally in World War 1, was arrested by Bayonne Police, interrogated, and judged to be “insane but harmless.”

In 1922, the Lehigh Valley Railroad was buried in lawsuits, and looking to fix blame on a German act of sabotage. Located in an Albany jail where he was serving time for theft Kristoff came to the judicial spotlight, once again. He admitted working for the Germans “for a few weeks” back in 1916, but was released before the claim could be investigated. Kristoff was finally traced to a pauper’s grave in 1928 and there ends his story, yet that ‘insane but harmless’ label remains open to question. Papers carried on the body exhumed from that potter’s field were indeed those of Michael Kristoff, but the dental records, didn’t match.

410px-Franz_von_Rintelen — “German Master Spy Franz Von Rintelen and his “pencil bomb” were responsible for acts of sabotage in the United States during World War I”. H/T Smithsonian

Meanwhile, suspicion fell on the German-born naturalized citizen Kurt Jahnke who ran sabotage operations for the German Admiralty out of bases in San Francisco and Mexico City with his assistant, Imperial German Navy Lieutenant Lothar Witzke. Witzke was arrested on February 1, 1918 in Nogales, Arizona and convicted by court martial. He was sentenced to death, though the war was over before sentence could be carried out. President Wilson later commuted the sentence, to life.

By 1923, most nations were releasing POWs from the “Great War”, including spies. A report from Leavenworth prison shows Witzke heroically risking his life, entering a boiler room after an explosion and probably averting disaster. It may be on that basis that he was finally released. Lieutenant Lothar Witzke was pardoned by President Calvin Coolidge on November 22, 1923 and deported to Berlin, where a grateful nation awarded him the Iron Cross, 1st and 2nd Class.

The U.S.–German Peace Treaty of 1921 established the German-American Mixed Claims Commission, which declared in 1939 that Imperial Germany had, in fact been responsible and awarded a judgement of $50 million. The Nazi government refused to pay and the matter was finally settled in 1953, with a judgement of $95 million (including interest) against the Federal Republic of Germany. The final payment was made in 1979.

Shrapnel damage may be see to this day, on the statue of Liberty

The Black Tom explosion and related acts of pro-German espionage resulted in the Federal Espionage Act signed into law in June 1917, creating, among its other provisions, a “Bureau of Investigation” under the United States Department of Justice.

Nothing remains today of the Black Tom terminal or the largest foreign terrorist attack on American soil until 9/11, save for a plaque, as seen in the photograph below. That, and a new law enforcement bureaucracy, called the FBI.

800px-StatueOfLibertyFromBlackTomIslandToday — View of the Statue of Liberty from the site of the Black Tom explosion

June 4, 1629 The Secrets of Wallabi Island

Three months after the original shipwreck, rescuers would discover a horror for the ages.

During the colonial period, European powers formed joint-stock companies to carry out foreign trade and exploration, to colonize distant lands and conduct military operations against foreign adversaries.

Such organizations may be chartered for a single voyage or for an extended period of time, and were much more than what we associate with the modern “company”. These organizations could raise their own armies, enforce the law up to and including trial and execution of accused wrongdoers and largely functioned outside the control of the governments which formed them.

The Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), better known as the Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602, was the world’s first formally listed public company, an early multi-national corporation paving the way to the corporate-led globalization of the early modern period.

On October 27, 1628, a Dutch East India Co. merchant fleet departed the Dutch West Indies bound for the south Pacific Moluccan Islands to trade for spices. Among these vessels was the 650-ton ship Batavia, embarked on her maiden voyage.

On board were enormous stockpiles of gold and silver coinage and a complement of 341 passengers and crew, including men, women and children.

Among ship’s officers were the bankrupt pharmacist Onderkoopman (junior merchant) Jeronimus Cornelisz, in flight from the Netherlands due to his heretical religous beliefs, and skipper Ariaen Jacobsz. While underway, the two conceived a plan to mutiny, and start a new life somewhere else. All that specie in the hold would make for a very nice start.

A small group of men were recruited and a plot was hatched, to molest a ranking female member of the passenger list. The plotters hoped to provoke a harsh act of discipline against the crew, which could then be used to recruit more men to the mutineers. Lucretia Jans was assaulted as planned but, for whatever reason, Opperkoopman (senior merchant) Francisco Pelsaert never made any arrests.

Perhaps the man was ill at the time but, be that as it may, the die was cast. The conspirators now needed only the right set of circumstances, to put their plans in motion.

Jacobsz deliberately steered the ship off course and away from the rest of the fleet. He got his ‘right set of circumstances’ on the morning of June 4, 1629, when Batavia struck a reef off the west coast of Australia.

Forty people drowned before the rest could be gotten safely to shore, swimming or transferred to nearby islands in the ship’s longboat and yawl.

With no source of fresh drinking water, the situation was dire. A group comprising Captain Jacobsz, Francisco Pelsaert, several senior officers and crew members plus a few passengers set out in a 30-foot longboat. The group performed one of the great feats of open boat navigation in all history, arriving after 33 days at the port of Batavia in modern-day Jakarta, Indonesia.

Boatswain Jan Evertsz was arrested and executed for negligence in the wreck of the Batavia, his role in the conspiracy never suspected.

Pelsaert was immediately given command of the Sardam by Batavia’s Governor General, Jan Coen.

Pelsaert’s rescue arrived three months after the original shipwreck, to discover a horror for the ages.

Left alone in charge of the survivors, Cornelisz and several co-conspirators took control of all the weapons and food supplies, then carried out plans to eliminate potential opposition.

A group of soldiers led by Wiebbe Hayes was tricked into being moved to West Wallabi Island, under the false pretense of looking for water. Convinced there was none, Cornelisz abandoned the group on the island to die. The psychopath and his dedicated band of followers, were now free to murder the rest at their leisure .

Author Mike Dash writes in Batavia’s Graveyard: The True Story of the Mad Heretic Who Led History’s Bloodiest Mutiny: “With a dedicated band of murderous young men, Cornelisz began to systematically kill anyone he believed would be a problem to his reign of terror, or a burden on their limited resources. The mutineers became intoxicated with killing, and no one could stop them. They needed only the smallest of excuses to drown, bash, strangle or stab to death any of their victims, including women and children”.

Like some neo-Mansonian psychopath, Cornelisz left the actual killing to others though he did attempt to poison one infant, who was later strangled. No fewer than 110 men, women and children were murdered during this period. Women left alive were confined to ‘rape tents’.

Meanwhile, Wiebbe Hayes and his soldiers found water and, unaware of the butchery taking place on Beacon island, began to send smoke signals, according to a prearranged plan. The group would only learn of the ongoing massacre from survivors, who escaped to swim for their lives.

800px-The_Fort_-_West_Wallabi_Island_-_Colour — Makeshift ‘fort’ built by Wiebbe Hayes and his soldiers, on West Wallabi Island

With their own supplies dwindling, Cornelisz & Co. assaulted the soldiers on West Wallabi Island, now in possession of crude handmade weapons and manning makeshift fortifications. Pitched battles ensued, pitting muskets against sticks and spears. The bad guys almost won too, but the better trained and (by this time) better fed soldiers, prevailed.

Pelsaert’s arrival triggered a furious race between Cornelisz’s men and the soldiers. Fortunately for all, Hayes won the race. A brief but furious battle ensued before Cornelisz and his company were captured. After a brief trial, Cornelisz and the worst of the conspirators were brought to Seal Island, their hands chopped off and the rest of them, hanged.

Two judged only to be minor players were brought to the Australian mainland and marooned, never to be seen again.

Image-bat-hist-04b — The hangings on Long Island as illustrated in the Lucas de Vries 1649 edition of *Ongeluckige Voyagie*.

The remaining conspirators were brought back to Batavia and tried. Five were hanged. Jacop Pietersz, second-in-command, was broken on the wheel, a hideous remnant of medieval justice and the worst form of execution available, at that time. Captain Jacobsz resisted days of torture and never did confess. What became of him is unknown.

Francisco Pelsaert was judged partly responsible for the disaster, due to his failure to exercise command. Senior Merchant Pelsaert’s assets were confiscated. He would die penniless in less than a year, a broken man.

The exact number of those buried in mass graves on Beacon Island, remains unknown. Of the 341 who departed the West Indies that day in 1628, 68 lived to tell the tale. Archaeologists labor an land and at sea but, three centuries later, the Wallabi Islands remain jealous of their secrets

http_o.aolcdn.comhssstoragemidas922be7ce080e004b9894e39c2f52e3db204025152batavia+3 — “Archaeologists recovering Batavia timbers from the wreck site”. H/T, HuffPo for this image

May 4, 1838 King of Cons

“I am sick and tired of this bluffer, or Quixote, or the devil knows what.
This man can hardly serve us in New Granada without heaping ten thousand embarrassments upon us”

In January 1848, a carpenter and sawmill operator named James Marshall discovered gold on the American River near Coloma, California. Some 300,000 flocked to the “Golden State” over the next few years from the United States and abroad, in search of fortune. For most, the “California Gold Rush” was tedious, dirty and difficult work. For Jefferson Randolph “Soapy“ Smith and his merry band of grifters, it was easier simply to fleece the miners out of their hard won gains through rigged poker games, scam three-card Monty and a catalog of petty deceits.

Between 1869 and 1872, the German actress and amateur “banker” Adele Spitzeder became the wealthiest woman in Germany, handsomely rewarding suckers…err…investors, with cash derived from new marks. Sarah Emily Howe ran the same con throughout the 1870s and ’80s through the “Ladies Deposit Company”, of Boston.

In the 1920s, Italian swindler Carlo Ponzi elevated this “rob Peter to pay Paul” scheme to such heights as to have the scam, named after himself. In the classic Ponzi scheme, early investors are paid above-average returns with the proceeds coming from new investors.

The wisely skeptical among us may question the legitimacy of consistently spectacular returns on investment but the money is real. Until it isn’t, and then heaven help the person left without a chair, when the music stops. For investors with Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities company, the music stopped in 2008 with early losses estimated at $18 billion dollars.

For New York’s Tammany Hall, the machinations of William Magear “Boss” Tweed elevated political corruption to such dizzying heights that the cost to taxpayers of building a single courthouse, nearly doubled that of the Alaska purchase.

Yet, in all the annals of humbuggery these are as nothing, a mere spark compared with the rising of a malign sun that was the “Cazique of Poyais”, Gregor MacGregor, the man who “sold” a continent. Or at least, part of one.

Between 1807 and 1814, a coalition of Spain, the United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Portugal went to war with the French forces of Napoleon Bonaparte for control of the Iberian peninsula.

Gregor MacGregor of the clan Gregor was a Scottish soldier and adventurer, an officer of the Peninsular war at the ripe old age of 16, the youngest age it was permitted to do so.

Having little interest in working the seven years required to become Captain, MacGregor prevailed upon the substantial dowry of his wealthy wife Maria Bowater and purchased the rank of Ensign and finally, Captain.

In 1810, a running feud with a superior officer caused MacGregor to resign his commission and receive a refund of the £1,350 he’d paid to become an officer. In 1811, actions of 57th Foot soldiers at the Battle of Albuera earned considerable prestige for the regiment and the nickname, “Die-Hards”. MacGregor would make much of his association with his former unit even though the man had been gone by this time, for a year.

The now 23-year old MacGregor moved into a house rented by his mother in Edinburgh for a time where he adopted the title of “Colonel”, and took to referring to himself as “Sir Gregor MacGregor, Bart“.

The latter is a term of nobility equivalent to a Baronet, indicating chieftainship among the clan, Gregor.

Despite parading about in extravagant finery and a badge indicating membership in an elite order of Portuguese knights, Edinburgh society failed to take notice. So it was the MacGregors moved to London, where an entirely fanciful family tree filled with Dukes and Barons, had the desired affect.

Being the kept man of a wealthy wife has its advantages but disaster struck, in 1811.

Maria Bowater MacGregor died that December. With her went the income and the support of the influential Bowater family. Most especially Maria’s father the Admiral who wasted no time in punting his now-former son in law.

For Gregor MacGregor, options were limited. Too soon to announce an engagement with any sense of decency to another heiress, a return to soldiering made sense. But not with the home team. Not after that ignominious departure, back in 1809. So…what about South America?

Since Napoleon’s 1807 invasion, Spain was beset with problems, at home. Inspired by the United States’ recent independence from Great Britain, Spanish colonies from Peru to Mexico rose up.

Venezuela was embarked on a full scale revolution at this time when General Francisco de Miranda visited London. And didn’t the man cut a dashing figure through London society, with all that military finery.

It’s unclear whether the two met at this time but, for MacGregor, this was the answer. Gregor MacGregor arrived in Venezuela in April 1812 and headed directly for Caracas. There, Miranda was delighted to entertain such an accomplished British military officer…a member of the famous “Die hards”, no less.

With Maria dead a scant six months back at home, MacGregor married the heiress of a prominent Caracas family and a cousin of the revolutionary leader Simón Bolívar, Doña Josefa Antonia Andrea Aristeguieta y Lovera, that June.

Venezuelan independence was a forlorn hope. General Miranda was captured and carted off to Spain, destined to end his days in a prison cell, in Cádiz.

Now “Colonel” MacGregor skedaddled with Josefa to the Dutch island of Curacao and on to Jamaica before returning to South America and accepting the rank of Brigadier General in service to New Granada, Venezuela’s neighbor to the west.

MacGregor’s South American military career is best remembered for a 34-day nation-wide retreat pursued by two Royalist armies and a hare-brained invasion of Amelia Island in Florida, resulting in the short-lived “Republic of the Floridas”. Then there was that time under fire in Porto Bello Panama, when he paddled out to his ships on a log and sailed away, abandoning his men to a miserable life, in captivity.

“Part of the fort at Porto Bello, Panama, where MacGregor abandoned his troops led by Colonel William Rafter in April 1819” – H/T Wikipedia

Even then there were those who proclaimed the “New Xenophon”, a latter-day Hannibal come forth to liberate the new Carthage. One of the more perspicacious New Granadan officials took the opposite view: “I am sick and tired of this bluffer, or Quixote, or the devil knows what” he wrote in a letter to a friend. “This man can hardly serve us in New Granada without heaping ten thousand embarrassments upon us“.

In 1820, MacGregor happened upon the Mosquito Coast (aka “Miskito), a swampy and inhospitable wilderness spanning the coasts of modern day Nicaragua, and Honduras. There, MacGregor persuaded a leader of the indigenous tribes to grant him land, to found a colony.

Woodcut depicting the non-existent “Black River Port”, of Poyais

Besotted with dreams of empire, MacGregor told tales back on British soil, of the independent Kingdom of “Poyais”. A land of vast wealth and welcoming natives where a man might work for a day and provide for his family, for a week. A land where he himself was “Cazique” or Royal Prince, a prestigious honor bestowed by none other than King George Frederic Augustus himself, of the Mosquito Coast.

The Cazique of Poyais set about recruiting settlers and investors, raising a dizzying £200,000, a sum equivalent to nearly 12 million, today. Settlers were invited to exchange their pounds sterling for Poyais dollars, the notes conveniently printed by none other, than Gregor MacGregor.

Seventy settlers departed England in the Autumn of 1822 bound for the tropical paradise, of Poyais. Another 200 followed a few months later only to be met by desperately poor natives, the bedraggled survivors of the earlier expedition and two American hermits.

Some evacuated to Honduras while fifty returned to England arriving in October, 1823. Inexplicably, most refused to blame MacGregor for the disaster. Even so, with Poyais dominating the headlines, the Cazique wisely performed a disappearing act. Across the channel to France where he ran the very same scam, this time raising £300,000.

French authorities got wind of the racket, impounding the ship and trying MacGregor, for fraud. Still unrepentant, the man was acquitted while an “associate” was convicted, in his stead.

“La Force Prison in Paris, where MacGregor was detained from December 1825 to July 1826, before his trial and acquittal” H/T Wikipedia

Back in England, MacGregor was re-arrested but released in a week, without charges. He persuaded the firm of Thomas Jenkins & Company to issue a new bond in the amount of £300,000, many believing the earlier debacle to be the result of someone else’s embezzlement. There followed another bond issue, this time amounting to £800,000. It was generally regarded as a humbug by this time, not that anyone ever thought to doubt the existence of Poyais itself. It’s just that those previous bonds, had failed to generate a profit.

Gregor MacGregor continued to dine out on the same sting but, by this time, the Poyais fix had seen its best days. An attempted sale of a few land certificates in 1837 marks the final appearance of the Poyais con.

Left: Poyais stock certificate, part of an £800,000 loan package, 1827

Josefa died on this day in 1838 in Burghmuirhead near Edinburgh. MacGregor immediately departed for Venezuela where he applied for reinstatement of his former rank, complete with back pay and a pension, of course. With MacGregor’s contributions to the Venezuelan Republic having been “heroic with immense results”, the Scotsman’s petition was approved in March, 1839. He settled in Caracas and died peacefully at home in December, 1845. The Cazique of Poyais was buried with full military honors at Caracas Cathedral with Presidente Carlos Soublette leading the procession, marching behind MacGregor’s coffin followed by a phalanx of cabinet ministers and military chiefs.

Back in Scotland, the Glenorchy Kirkyard near Loch Katrine has served as the ancestral burial ground for the Gregor clan, since 1390. There you will find an “octagonal-shaped Gothic church with its square tower and pointed stained-glass windows [set] in a peaceful graveyard on top of a knoll” according to find-a-grave.com. There is no mention of Gregor MacGregor nor of the tropical paradise, of his invention.

April 26, 1859 Temporary Insanity

Think your “Representative” in Congress is a piece of work? I feel your pain. With apologies to Mr. A. Lincoln, “It is altogether fitting and proper” that the first use of the insanity defense in an American courtroom, just happened to be for the murder of a District Attorney, by a member of the United States Congress.

In case you think your own member of congress is a piece of work, he or she probably has nothing on Tammany Hall’s own, Daniel “Devil Dan” Edgar Sickles. Sickles carried on an “indiscreet affair” for years, with well-known prostitute Fanny White. No fan of Victorian era propriety, Sickles loved nothing more than to introduce Fanny to scandalized breakfast guests. As a member of the New York assembly in 1847, Sickles earned a censure from the opposition Whig party, for bringing White into the assembly chamber.

He almost certainly arranged the mortgage on White’s brothel, using the name of his friend and future father-in-law Antonio Bagioli. Sickles married Teresa Bagioli in 1852 when he was 33 and she 15 and pregnant, much to the chagrin of both families. Fanny White was so angry she followed him to a hotel room and attacked him, with a riding whip.

As personal secretary for the Ambassador to the Court of St. James and future US President James Buchanan, Sickles left his pregnant wife behind, bringing along Fanny White, instead. Meeting Queen Victoria herself at Buckingham palace, Sickles introduced the prostitute as “Miss Bennett”, using the name of the hated editor of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett, Senior. Queen Victoria never got wise to the ruse but Bennett was furious, at the use of his name.

Carrying on with a known prostitute was one thing, but the Mrs. having an affair with a United States District Attorney, was quite another.

Following Teresa’s confession of her adultery with the US Attorney for the Washington District, Congressman Sickles shot and killed the man in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House. The deceased was one Philip Barton Key, none other than the son of Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner”.

Sickles surrendered and went on trial for premeditated murder, obtaining the legal services of future Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. By the time the defense rested, Washington newspapers were praising Sickles for “saving all the ladies of Washington from this rogue named Key”.

In the first use of the temporary insanity defense in US legal history, Dan Sickles was acquitted on April 26, 1859.

I’ve long believed that social media has elevated us all to new heights of chicken excrement, but maybe not. Sickles’ supporters and detractors alike worked themselves into a perfect snit, more exercised over the man’s public reconciliation with his wife than his murder charges.

As a “War Democrat”, a Democrat in favor of prosecuting the war with the Confederacy, Sickles became an important political ally to Republican President Lincoln, receiving a commission as Brigadier General despite having no previous combat experience.

HoleMap — Sickles III Corp position, Gettysburg, day 2

On the first day of the Battle at Gettysburg, July 1, General Robert E. Lee came at the Union right. On day 2 he advanced against the union left, squarely aimed at General Sickles position, at the base of little Round top. Except, Devil Dan wasn’t there. In defiance of orders, Sickles abandoned a great gap in his lines and moved his 3rd corps a mile out front, taking a position in a peach orchard.

All but alone now, III Corps was hit from left, right and center and shattered, in the Confederate assault. Sickles himself was hit by a cannon ball that mangled his right leg. With a saddle strap for a tourniquet he was toted off to III Corps hospital, grinning, propped up on an elbow and smoking a cigar.

Following Sickles’ bloodbath at the peach orchard, the frantic footrace to the undefended crest of Little Round Top and the savage hand to hand fighting that followed, was just about all that saved the Union army.

Following amputation, Sickles insisted on being transported to Washington DC where he arrived, on July 4. Gettysburg was by now a great Union victory, one for which Sickles set about immediately crafting the narrative of his own heroic contribution.

Sickles donated his leg to the newly founded Army Medical Museum in Washington, DC, along with a visiting card marked, “With the compliments of Major General D.E.S.” He visited his leg for several years thereafter, on the anniversary of the amputation.

Despite near-disastrous insubordination, Sickles was awarded the medal of honor and continued his service, through the end of the war. To his everlasting disgust he never did receive another battlefield command.

Sickles commanded several military districts during Reconstruction and served as U.S. Minister to Spain where he carried on with none other than the deposed Queen Isabella II.

Eventually returning to the United States Congress, Sickles made important legislative contributions to the preservation of the Battlefield at Gettysburg.

Virtually every senior Union commander at Gettysburg is remembered, through his own monument. All except Dan Sickles. Once asked where his monument was, Congressman Sickles replied: “The whole park is my monument.”

May 4, 1838 King of Cons

“I am sick and tired of this bluffer, or Quixote, or the devil knows what.
This man can hardly serve us in New Granada without heaping ten thousand embarrassments upon us”

Yet in all the annals of humbuggery these are as nothing, a mere spark compared with the rising of a malign sun compared with the “Cazique of Poyais”, Gregor MacGregor, the man who “sold” a continent. Or at least, part of one.

Between 1807 and 1814, a coalition of Spain, the United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Portugal went to war with the French forces of Napoleon Bonaparte for control of the Iberian peninsula.

Gregor MacGregor of the clan Gregor was a Scottish soldier and adventurer, an officer of the Peninsular war at the ripe old age of 16, the youngest age it was permitted to do so.

In 1810, a running feud with a superior officer caused MacGregor to resign his commission and receive a refund of the £1,350 he’d paid to become an officer. In 1811, actions of the 57th Foot Regiment at the Battle of Albuera earned considerable prestige for the regiment and the nickname, “Die-Hards”. MacGregor would make much of his association with his former unit even though the man had been gone by this time, for a year.

The now 23-year old MacGregor and Maria moved into a house rented by his mother in Edinburgh for a time where he adopted the title of “Colonel” and took to referring to himself as “Sir Gregor MacGregor, Bart“.

The latter is a term of nobility equivalent to a Baronet, indicating chieftainship among the clan, Gregor.

Being the kept man of a wealthy wife has its advantages but disaster struck, in 1811.

Since Napoleon’s 1807 invasion, Spain was beset with problems, at home. Inspired by the United States’ recent independence from Great Britain, Spanish colonies from Peru to Mexico rose up.

Venezuelan independence was a forlorn hope. General Miranda was captured and carted off to Spain, destined to end his days in a prison cell, in Cádiz.

French authorities got wind of the racket, impounding the ship and trying MacGregor, for fraud. Still unrepentant, the man was acquitted while an “associate” was convicted, in his stead.

Left: Poyais stock certificate, part of an £800,000 loan package, 1827

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