Diary Of A Scammer - The American Dream, A Sucker Born Every Minute

Mackintosh Peters was a snake oil salesmen in the Arizona Territory in the 1870s, and made a good living selling worthless gum Arabic and corn syrup mixtures to the Piute and Navajo.  'Works like a charm', Mack told the Indians, 'take a swig in the morning and one in the evening, and it'll cure what ails you'. 

Which was arthritis, impotence, scabies, catarrh, and suppuration and anything else he could conjure up.  He was long gone before the Indians knew they had been had, but the placebo effect has been around for centuries, so many of his customers told their friend and families how good they felt after only a day's dosage.  If for some reason he found himself back in the same village and was accosted by the Indians he had duped, he had a ready reply. 'Ahh, of course', he said.  'I said two swigs in the morning and two at night, not one.'

'What's a swig?' asked an elder of the tribe. 

'Why, like this', Mack said, swilling a half-bottle down in one gulp. 'Ya see, ya wasn't takin' nearly half as much', and with that, he lit out of town, his racks of phials and bottles clinking and rattling in the back seat of the wagon as he drove. 

'There's a sucker born every minute', said the circus impresario, P.T. Barnum, and with that under his belt, he made millions off the rubes who wandered into his tents.  His freak show was the most popular - two headed babies, bearded dwarves, and half-man, half-woman giants.  The gawkers always came back, sometimes the same day to see the unbelievable creatures assembled in Barnum's side show. 

Along the trail with Mack Peters were scores of shell game wizards and con artists of every kind, fleecing unsuspecting rural folk out of their money.  There were get-rich-quick schemes, virility potions, games of 'chance', temptingly easy card games, and more inventive scams you can imagine.  It seemed that the business of rural America in the early years was the scam. 

At the same time as the nation industrialized, there was plenty of room for bamboozling. Real estate agents, mortgage lenders, horse traders, and used car salesmen all made a bonanza.  It was remarkably easy to bilk money out of consumers in those days, and even at the highest level of finance, trickery and chicanery was rife. Property owners inflated prices, hid structural defects, paid off inspectors and politicians and ran off with thousands.  When the buildings sold collapsed or rotted, they were long gone. 

Scamming was in Alvin Bard's blood.  Mack Peters, the snake oil salesman who had made thousands in Ohio alone before the revenuers caught him in a silo in Chillicothe was his hero.  Conning, scamming, fraud, and snake oil sales had always been a booming business.  The products might have changed but the principle remained the same - a sucker is indeed born every minute. 

Before turning to cyber-fraud he worked for Bear Stearns before they were shut down by the SEC.  Alvin had been the designer of the most sophisticated, intricate, devilishly complex and therefore impossible to trace financial instruments ever. 

Alvin was a natural.  As a kid before the days of social media, electronic, cybernetic revolution, he loved the con.  He used the upstairs phone to call his father's friend, imitate a mafia boss from New Haven, and ask for 'Patsy'; or solicit donations for the homeless from a wealthy neighbor, posing, using a well-practiced patrician accent as the Director of Christian Charity United; or let the neighbor with the barking dog know that Fido's days were numbered. 

After Wall Street Alvin could have continued as a financial investment consultant. Jeffrey Skilling, convicted of Enron investor fraud, operated a legitimate consulting business from his jail cell, secured millions in offshore accounts, and when finally released from prison was hired as a consultant for those many Wall Street firms who narrowly escaped prosecution and who needed to jump start the alternate financial universe. 

 

Alvin had made millions, all as protected and secured as Skilling's, and so money was not the object of his 'retirement'.  He wanted the thrill of the chase - a popular hero like Billings Callum, Bonnie and Clyde or Junior Johnson and the white lightning North Carolina moonshiners. The days of creative financial instruments and Bernie Madoff's ingenious Ponzi schemes were over and done with. A new age had arrived, an electronic, cybernetic, AI world of sophisticated, untraceable scams. 

Rudy Kurniawan was a young Indonesian wine fraudster, and before he was caught he had bilked millions out of credulous, arrogantly presumptuous connoisseurs.  He bought surplus French wine, bottled, corked, and labeled it as the most sought-after French vintages, convinced investors that there was no top to the fine wine market, and made a fortune. 

The 'connoisseurs' never drank the wine but traded it as a commodity, so the fake wine passed from hand to hand without ever being opened.  Every aspect of the scam had been carefully planned and executed - he learned how to 'age' labels and corks, and find bottles that defied provenance - all this helped by buyers who had been snookered by Rudy's exquisite palate and business acumen. 

Alvin knew that even such marvelously ingenious schemes were old hat.  The New Age had had no 'things', no physical traces, no safe deposit boxes, nothing of the kind. It was all in the cloud, in the rich air of cyberspace, subject only to the laws of quantum physics where velocity and position were relative and the bosons of the universe went circling and colliding leaving nary a trace. 

The Nigerians had started the whole enterprise.  Tens, hundreds of thousands of appeals went out at the click of a mouse and if only a fraction of one percent bore fruit, the Nigerian scammer would be set up for life.  After the genie was out of the bottle and the whole scamming landscape had quickly evolved into a barely recognizable, untraceable universe, there was no limit to the money that could be made. 

In the early pre-AI period of big data, researchers found out that if you crowdsourced a problem, that is open-sourced it and bypassed experts, the results were not only equivalent to what a stable of professionals could achieve but went far beyond.   When AI arrived and the cyber universe became even more vastly unimaginable and subject to equations that only a handful of scientists understood, scamming became the wizardry of the ages; and Alvin wanted to be the first trillionaire. 

P.T. Barnum made a fortune off the credulous and the gullible, and the old adage 'You can fool most of the people most of the time' or some permutation thereof was still universally true; so there was no stopping the new generation of scammers. 

'Let the buyer beware' was the meme of the times, and beware the consumer certainly had to be in an environment of endemic corruption, fraud, and larceny.  It was a free-for-all where if you were canny and deftly underhanded, you could become wealthy. Government watchdog agencies have made such chicanery a bit more difficult, but they have simply raised the bar.  It takes more than a silver tongue to fool millions. 

There were occasional throwbacks.  Somali immigrants bilked the state of Minnesota and the city of Minneapolis out of millions simply by creating shells - fake Learning Centers for pre-school children with not one enrollee nor one legitimate teacher.  It was all smoke and mirrors and the state and municipal government bought the scheme hook, line, and sinker.  Diversity ruled, and who was to doubt the integrity of black African refugees from one of the world's most pestilential places?

Alvin had no interest in such schemes.  They amounted to chicken feed compared to major cyber fraud. Both were based on the assumption of credibility, the complicity of buyer and seller and the complex almost indecipherable networks underlying the schemes, but one made immeasurable profits while the other bought a few Mercedes. 

The die was cast, and Alvin Bard launched himself into the heady world of fraud-in-the-cloud. He had gotten a late start - high tech never sits still and the few years that had passed since Madoff, Skilling, and the Nigerians were filled with accelerating means to fraudulent ends.  With every new remarkable innovation in cyber technology AI and virtual reality - innovations bound to help the blind see and the deaf hear among other things - someone was figuring out how to harness this explosive new technology to bilk, scam, fool and con. 

Alvin understood consumer dynamics, American culture, and the fundamentals of AI, cybersecurity, the ins and outs of both and most importantly how not to get caught.  Below board entrepreneurs had always outfoxed the revenuers, stayed one step ahead; and now, no matter how many resources were invested in public and private security, scammers always found a loophole.

The inner workings of the cyber-fraud that made him billions were never deciphered for Alvin was no longer around to to the decoding.  He had disappeared from the face of the earth and was reported to be living in as far flung places as Ndjamena or Port Moresby.  What was there to spend his billions on in these godforsaken places? Nothing, but that was not the point.  The thrill of the chase, victory under the noses of the best and the brightest, suckers taken for a ride without even knowing it.  

America, what a great country!

Sex And Savvy, The Currency Of Washington - Trading Up From Hogs And Corn, The Saga Of An Ambitious Farm Girl

Ada Louise Burnham was from Parker's Corner, Ohio, a small town not far from Chillicothe where people went after church to the Fireman's all-you-can-eat buffet held on the fairgrounds. Billy Graham had led revivals there which the Chillicothe Sun Times reported had brought one hundred souls to Jesus, a record for the county. 

Jemima Flanders, however, thrice widowed and grandmother of twenty-four, insisted that back in 1904 her mother and grandmother were both saved by Billy Sunday, America's most famous preacher of the day.  He, Jemima went on, had chosen their little rural community because the Bible had pointed the way. In 1 Peter:24-26 it was written:

All people are like grass, and their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord endures forever

'Parker's Corner', he had said, 'was the place Peter had in mind when he reflected on the Lord's bounty and that of the Creator, a place of faith, spiritual prosperity, and homespun goodness'. 

Parker's Corner had always felt itself important - forgotten, overlooked, dismissed by those living far from its pristine beauty, peace, and harmony; but never by its families who had farmed the land since the first great Westward expansion. Parker's Corner was indeed God's country. 

It was, of course, no stranger to lies, jealousies, innuendoes, and false accusations.  The townspeople would rather forget the brutal murder of Hiram Walker, disemboweled and hung by the heels from the rafter of his barn.

Finding the murderer was not difficult, for the dispute between Walker and Frenchy LaMotte had gone on for years, a real Hatfield-McCoy feud. The knife that had sliced Hiram up was found in the corn crib and it didn't take much to trace it back to LaMotte who was so stupid he left his tracks in the mud from the barn directly to his farmhouse a quarter mile down the road.  

That and the famous 'Well Water Scandal', so called because Philomena Roberts was caught by the well with her lover in flagrante delicto, undressed to the waist, petticoats above her head, her hand on the handle as though ready to haul up a bucket of water.  

 

In any case Ada Louise, as proud as she was of the Midwestern idyll where she grew up, had big ambitions - Washington, the Nation's Capital, Congress, the White House, the corridors of power and home to the best and the brightest. Although the Congressman from her district was a saggy, lumpen man far from the JFK charm that had seduced Marilyn Monroe, the other younger members of the political elite had a macho charisma which appealed to the young girl; and knowing little but hogs and soybeans, she was easily wooed. 

 

Flyover country.  When she first heard it on the Baltimore & Ohio from Columbus, she was surprised but the man who casually said this to his travelling companion was the kind of man she had always hoped to meet - the stranger on the train who would take her to places unknown. 

This, like everything else in the Midwest, was nothing new.  The very first scenes of Sinclair Lewis' novel, Sister Carrie was exactly like this.  Carrie, on her way East to make her way, is approached by an impressive young man who charms her with his savoir faire, snappy dress, and presence, and he becomes her patron and lover. Carrie is no dupe, however, no ingenue, no naive girl, but a savvy, calculating, and intelligent young woman.  She takes up the traveler's offer, the first of many on her way to success and stardom.

 

Lewis understood, respected, and admired the Midwest, and his heroine in the novel Main Street is both from that simple, unadorned middle American community that was to be the heartland of the new republic, and critical of it.  She goes to a small rural community not unlike Parker's Corner, Ohio, and finds herself irritable, dissatisfied, and emotionally lost; but instead of giving in to depression and the vision of insular life she has consigned herself to, she commits herself to changing the way things are, to bring art, theatre, and a lively intellectual life to this horribly removed place. 

She is unsuccessful, of course. Old habits are hard to change, and the very qualities that give the Midwest its simple appeal are the cause for its characteristic intolerance and unwillingness to change. 

Ada Louise was far more like Carrie than Carol.  Without knowing it, she had the same willful ambition, the same unconcern with received wisdom and morality as Carrie Underwood.  'Flyover country' simply hardened her resolve. She would nevermore be thought of as a rube, a hick, a backcountry calicoed milkmaid. 

The man on the train was a whistle-stop salesman - an old school samples-in-the-briefcase hawker.  He was an anachronism in an age of Amazon and social media but as he explained he was schooled in the art of Barnum & Bailey where salesmanship is an art - not of deception but conviction - and if the young lady would be willing to have dinner with him at his next stop in Pittsburgh, he would be delighted. 

A first step, she later reflected, for what did she know except Billy Baxter behind the silo on a cold, snow-flaky winter day - but even that was a dose of reality. It didn't feel exactly good but not bad either, but that was beside the point.  It was something that had to be gotten out of the way before too much time passed. 

 

Some women, Ada Louise among them have a well-defined, well-articulated, irresistible sexuality - men are drawn to them like bees to flowers - and as she went along her path she knew that this was not only an endowment, the Creator's gift, but the key to her future. Her intelligence, her savvy, and her canny understanding of human dynamics, social, political, or economic, were only ancillary to this ineluctable sexuality. 

Women have slept their way to the top since time immemorial.  Cleopatra bedded both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony - two of the most powerful men in the Empire - certainly not for love but for advantage. Hollywood starlets have seen bedding the producer nothing more than paying dues.  Morality, self-esteem, respect had nothing to do with it. 

As her train pulled into Washington's Union Station, she felt confident of her abilities, her ambition and above all her willful control of men.  How was she able to deduce such an innate trait from one man in a seedy Pittsburgh hotel?  That was her genius, her talent, her greatest piece of art.  

Child prodigies are able to play Bach at five years old, solve complex mathematical problems at ten, graduate from MIT at twelve. Why did such innate talent have to be confined to that?  Her ability to navigate her way in sexually chaotic waters and always, inevitably come out on top was no different. 

D.H. Lawrence understood this and placed sexual satisfaction at the heart of human enterprise.  Few would have the ability to reach the untold heights of sexual epiphany, but those who did were physical and emotional geniuses.  

Too much ambition, will, and desire - as Shakespeare well knew - was always and inevitably women's downfall.  Goneril, Regan, Tamora, Dionyza, Lady Macbeth and many others fell to ambition and greedy hunger for power and dominance.  All the emotional sentience in the world is no good unless parlayed properly. 

 

The train traveler had his Washington connections, and as basic and old-world as they were, they were fine indeed; and savvy as she was, she was able to parlay them into much better, much more promising opportunities.  With this natural savvy, indomitable will, and natural, irresistible sexuality, Washington was an open door. 

Did she sleep her way to the top? Yes and no, for sex is a commonly exchanged currency in Hollywood, Washington, or the streets of New York; but the laws of supply and demand apply in all situations.  Ada Louise knew her Milton Friedman and Adam Smith and did quite well.  Before long the had a sinecure with one of the most powerful men in the Senate and a promising political career if she so chose. 

In America the days of patrician, old-money, aristocratic governance is a thing of the past, and anyone can be President, so the political and sexual ambitions of those around her who saw advantage and satisfaction were not unfounded and misdirected. 

Washington is not so venal and self-absorbed a place that the tale of Ada Louise suggests, but politics is a graspy affair.  It takes ambition, will, and a certain moral diffidence to be elected, a few years to enjoy the perks of office, and then back out on the hustings to flaunt success.  By the time the cycle is completed, the politician is convinced of his righteousness, entitlement, and appeal.  He is on the lookout for cash contribution and sexual trophies like Ada Louise. 

It didn't take a cycle for Ada Louise to learn what's what.  Such an innately savvy and perceptive young woman knew exactly how things worked - the predictability of the male ego, his quick and easy abandonment of propriety, and his sexual gullibility.  Plums were there for the taking. 

The whole political shebang however was just a game for Ada Louise.  She could have become a politician - there were a number of vacant safe seats out there and she was courted by members on both sides of the aisle, but she demurred.  The fun was in the getting, the manipulation, and the control. She was Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, a woman for whom the exercise of pure will was the only validation she needed.  To subject a man completely to it was an exhilarating exercise, worth every moment. 

Ada Louise worked her way through the men of Washington, young and old with such dexterity, agility, and sexual savvy that she could have anything she wanted from them; but, like Hedda, just brining them to heel was enough. 

So much for flyover country. 

'The Bitch Set Me Up' - The Endemic Corruption Of Municipal Government

Marion Barry, Mayor for Life, was mayor of DC for many years, and won reelection again and again despite the lowest socio-economic indictors of any major city, endemic crime, the dysfunctional inner city, and Third World poverty level. 

 

He was popular because of his generosity, his walkin' around money, his embrace of entitlement, reparations, and giving away the store to his black constituents.  During his reign, the black population in DC was 70 percent, mostly poor and living in ghettoes across the Anacostia River, and in crowded city centers near Prince George's County. 

He was dismissive of the white population concentrated in Wards 2 and 3 despite the fact that they contributed the lion's share of municipal taxes.  He knew that as much as these white residents hated him and every elected voted in a bloc for any candidate but him, he had electoral democracy on his side. 

The white professionals who lived in these wards were liberal to a man, progressive in outlook and political preference, and most had never once in their lives voted Republican, but Barry was too much.  The city was known as The Murder Capital of the US during the crack epidemic when ghetto drug lords in consort with Jamaican crewes fought bloody battles for distribution rights, turf, and hegemony.  Despite the harshest gun laws in the country, the city was awash with illegal guns, and drive-by shootings, executions, and street corner shootouts were so common they never made the news.  

DC was a miserable place, tough to abide, and tougher to live in; and yet because of Barry's civil rights credentials, a coffers-open policy for entitlement money, a no-show job patronage for his most ardent supporters across the River, he was beloved by his black constituents.  His was a city hall which governed in name only but as long as the patronage and walkin' around money continued, and as long as he stuck it to the white man, he was King of DC. 

Among the white population of DC Barry was remembered for three things he said.  First, when the city was covered with over a foot of snow and the white wards never saw a plow, Barry said, 'It'll melt', putting the complainers in their place, a roundhouse punch which said, 'Nothing doing', the city is mine. 

Second, when he won another resounding electoral victory with not one vote from either Ward 2 or 3, he said, 'Get over it'.  He would be mayor for life despite the whining Karens of upper Northwest. 

Third, when he had been caught in an FBI sting smoking crack with local hookers, Barry said, 'The bitch set me up'; but his arrest was simply something he could not undo.  He was finished, done for, and a new hardline, tough balance sheet mayor was appointed to head a Congress-appointed government.  Anthony Williams was eventually elected, and the Barry days were over. 

When news of his arrest hit the streets, white DC residents cheered, but his black supporters agreed with him.  Besides, crack, ho's, and crack ho's were nothing new to the ghetto, commonplace, and a part of the inner city fabric.  His arrest was no more than the white man putting an uppity black man in his place. 

However, DC remains the same.  Despite hundreds of millions of federal and local grants said to improve the abysmal conditions in the slums of the nation's capital, there has been only desultory progress.  The truancy rate is well over fifty percent, murder, assault, and rape are still atop the leader board up there with Baltimore, Detroit, and St. Louis, and the ghetto is still a nasty, no-go place. 

DC City Council members have been Barry clones ever since his departure and DC's return to Home Rule. Under the aegis and protection of the Biden Administration and a complaisant Congress DC passed many give-way, de facto reparations, and entitlement laws.  They were among many municipal governments which after George Floyd defunded the police, decriminalized all but the most violent crimes.  DC was once again the carnival of corruption it was under Barry  

Now a new 'Democratic Socialist' Mayor will take office next year, and she promises to empty the treasury 'to make DC a welcoming home for all'.  All public services will be free or available at nominal cost, community policing will replace enforced discipline and crime surveillance, and welfare rather than opportunity will become the ethos. 

Of course DC is not alone in its corruption, mismanagement, and misrule.  Chicago, the home of dead-man voter, 'Vote Early and Often' elections, the Al Capone era of Mafia-coopted governance and jurisprudence, and the ward politics of Hinky Dink Kenna and Bathhouse John Coughlin, has never budged from its sinkhole political reputation.  Minneapolis gave away millions to fraudulent Somalis out of concern for 'inclusivity' and 'doing the right thing' for needy asylees, and the true cost of the deal is yet to be uncovered.  Without a doubt someone in power bought a new Mercedes. 

The mayors of cities with significant black populations have ridden the progressive tide and given way taxpayer money with impunity, all in the name of inclusivity, diversity, equity and reparations for slavery. 

Smaller cities across the US have not been exempted, and they too regardless of racial composition have seen a windfall in kickbacks, unnecessary public works, donor patronage, and insider deals.  Millions have been spent on unneeded curb and sidewalk repair, park 'improvements' and unnecessary 'renovations'. 

How could this happen? 

When a longtime resident of New York City was asked how the current Socialist Mayor of the city could have been elected, and in a few short months has gone far to bankrupt the city and force hundreds of high tax-paying investment and high-tech firms and wealthy individuals to flee, he said that Mamdami simply looks like the thousands of immigrants in Queens and Brooklyn and his promise to give them everything for nothing was the best campaign strategy ever. 

The conservative economist Thomas Sowell has been a critic of government, both federal and local for taking money from those who earned it and giving it to those who have not - all with no accountability. With no such accountability, the tendency to take money and give it away for political and personal financial rewards is irresistible.  

  

It is easy to revile the rich for their greed and racist insensitivity and the need to redistribute their wealth to those who deserve it - as Sen. Bernie Sanders has done - and to be a millionaire with three homes and a luxurious life style.  No one is holding his feet to the fire.  No one who has bought his progressive cant hook, line, and sinker has bothered to look at consequences, rate of return, risk, compromise, or the bottom line.  

Municipal governments' accountability is even less. Those like DC's are uniformly democratic socialist, so there is no 'other side of the aisle', no inquisitive press, no high stakes.  Municipal governments tend to be progressive because there is more in it for them to be 'generous'.  It is easy to get elected if you can actually take from the rich and give it to the poor as DC has done with its venal transfers of wealth from Wards 2 and 3 to Wards 7 and 8.  The Washington Post before Bezos ownership was in lockstep with the redistributive, reparations mindset of the DC city council and rarely came down hard on its profligate no-accountability spending. 

Residents of one Ward 3 neighborhood watched as a perfectly good service alley was torn up and replaced by a new one at a cost of millions.  Who benefited?  Not the garbage trucks who picked up the trash without issue, not the rare car which had mistakenly turned into the alley.  Not the homeowners for whom the alley was nothing more than a service route.  

Or the new sidewalks in one of the area's wealthiest neighborhoods were people drove, never walked; or the universal handicapped curb cuts when residents had not seen a wheelchair in decades and Uber rides would have been far more cost-effective. 

Inefficiency, mismanagement, and self-interested dispensing of taxpayer money is par for the governmental course, getting worse as one descends the scale.  Montgomery County, a wealthy jurisdiction adjacent to DC built bike lanes along a well-travelled commuter route and in so doing closed two lanes of traffic increasing congestion and pollution; and to this day not one bike has been seen on the new lanes.  The dedicated lanes go no more than one block and then dead end.  It is the bike lane to nowhere, and yet the county built it because it felt good to do something for the environment. 

It is no surprise that the Unites States is always halfway down the international corruption list.  Americans have been cheating and conning since the days of itinerant snake oil salesmen and Elmer Gantry preachers.  We came kicking and screaming to civic order and the restrictions of laws and regulations but quickly figured out ways to make money from it all. 

So, you get what you deserve. Vote your conscience and still get screwed; but that is the American way.